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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVESTMENT OF INFLUENCE ***
Produced by Al Haines
MCMXII
Copyright 1897
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. Toronto: 25
Richmond Street, W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100
Princes Street
DEDICATION
Many years have now passed since we first met. During all this time
you have been an unfailing guide and helper. Your friendship has
doubled life's joys and halved its sorrows. You have strengthened me
where I was weak and weakened me where I was too strong. You have
borne my burdens and lent me strength to bear my own.
TO YOU
TO YOU--MY FRIEND
FOREWORD.
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
"I do not believe the world is dying for new ideas. A teacher has a
high place amongst us, but someone is wanted here and abroad far more
than a teacher. It is power we need, power that shall help us to solve
our practical problems, power that shall help us to realize a high,
individual, spiritual life, power that shall make us daring enough to
act out all we have seen in vision, all we have learnt in principle
from Jesus Christ."--_Charles A. Berry_.
"And Saul sent messengers to take David: and when they saw the company
of prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing as appointed over them,
the Spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they also
prophesied. And when it was told Saul, he sent other messengers and
they prophesied likewise. And Saul sent messengers again the third
time, and they prophesied also. Then went Saul to Ramah, and he said,
Where are Samuel and David? And one said, Behold they be at Naioth.
And Saul went thither, and the Spirit of God came on him also and he
prophesied. Wherefore man said: Is Saul also among the
prophets?"--_I. Samuel, xix, 20-21_.
CHAPTER I.
Nature's forces carry their atmosphere. The sun gushes forth light
unquenchable; coals throw off heat; violets are larger in influence
than bulb; pomegranates and spices crowd the house with sweet odors.
Man also has his atmosphere. He is a force-bearer and a
force-producer. He journeys forward, exhaling influences. Scientists
speak of the magnetic circle. Artists express the same idea by the
halo of light emanating from the divine head. Business men understand
this principle, those skilled in promoting great enterprises bring the
men to be impressed into a room and create an atmosphere around them.
In measuring Kossuth's influence over the multitudes that thronged and
pressed upon him the historian said: "We must first reckon with the
orator's physical bulk and then carry the measuring-line about his
atmosphere."
Thinking of the evil emanating from a bad man, Bunyan made Apollyon's
nostrils emit flames. Edward Everett insists that Daniel Webster's
eyes during his greatest speech literally emitted sparks. Had we tests
fine enough we would doubtless find each man's personality the center
of outreaching influences. He himself may be utterly unconscious of
this exhalation of moral forces, as he is of the contagion of disease
from his body. But if light is in him he shines; if darkness rules he
shades, if his heart glows with love he warms; if frozen with
selfishness he chills; if corrupt he poisons; if pure-hearted he
cleanses. We watch with wonder the apparent flight of the sun through
space, glowing upon dead planets, shortening winter and bringing
summer, with birds, leaves and fruits. But that is not half so
wonderful as the passage of a human heart, glowing and sparkling with
ten thousand effects, as it moves through life. The soul, like the
sun, has its atmosphere, and is over against its fellows, for light,
warmth and transformation.
All great writers have had their incident of the atmosphere their hero
carried. Centuries ago King Saul sent his officers to arrest a seer
who had publicly indicted the tyrant for outbreaking sins. When the
soldier entered the prophet's presence he was so profoundly affected by
the majesty of his character that he forgot the commission and his
lord's command, asking rather to become the good man's protector.
Likewise with the second group of soldiers--coming to arrest, they
remained to befriend. Then the King's anger was exceedingly hot
against him who had become a conscience for the throne. Rushing forth
from his palace, like an angry lion from his lair, the King sought the
place where this man of God was teaching the people. But, lo! when the
King entered the brave man's presence his courage, fidelity and
integrity overcame Saul and conquered him unto confession of his
wickedness. Just here we may remember that stout-hearted Pilate, with
a legion of mailed soldiers to protect him, trembled and quaked before
his silent prisoner. And King Agrippa on his throne was afraid, when
Paul lifting his chains, fronted him with words of righteousness and
judgment. Carlyle says that in 1848, during the riot in Paris, the mob
swept down a street blazing with cannon, killed the soldiers, spiked
the guns, only to be stopped a few blocks beyond by an old,
white-haired man who uncovered and signaled for silence. Then the
leader of the mob said: "Citizens, it is De la Eure. Sixty years of
pure life is about to address you!" A true man's presence transformed
a mob that cannon could not conquer.
The Greek poet says men knew when the goddess came to Thebes because of
the blessings she left in her track. Her footprints were not in the
sea, soon obliterated, nor in the snow, quickly melting, but in fields
and forests. This unseen friend, passing by the tree blackened by a
thunderbolt, stayed her step; lo! the woodbine sprang up and covered
the tree's nakedness. She lingered by the stagnant pool--the pool
became a flowing spring. She rested upon a fallen log--from decay and
death came moss, the snowdrop and the anemone. At the crossing of the
brook were her footprints; not in mud downward, but in violets that
sprang up in her pathway. O beautiful prophecy! literally fulfilled
2,000 years afterward in the life of the London apple woman, whose
atmosphere sweetened bitter hearts and made evil into good.
When Mephistopheles appears in human form his presence falls upon homes
like the black pall of the consuming plague, that robes cities for
death. The classic writer tells of an Indian princess sent as a
present to Alexander the Great. She was lovely as the dawn; yet what
especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath;
richer than a garden of Persian roses. A sage physician discovered her
terrible secret. This lovely woman had been reared upon poisons from
infancy until she herself was the deadliest poison known. When a
handful of sweet flowers was given to her, her bosom scorched and
shriveled the petals; when the rich perfume of her breath went among a
swarm of insects, a score fell dead about her. A pet humming-bird
entering her atmosphere, shuddered, hung for a moment in the air, then
dropped in its final agony. Her love was poison; her embrace death.
This tale has held a place in literature because it stands for men of
evil all compact, whose presence has consumed integrities and exhaled
iniquities. Happily the forces that bless are always more numerous and
more potent than those that blight. Cast a bushel of chaff and one
grain of wheat into the soil and nature will destroy all the chaff but
cause the one grain of wheat to usher in rich harvests.
Not seldom has a youth been turned from the way of integrity by the
influence of a single friend. Endowed as man is, the weight of his
being effects the most astonishing results. Witness Stratton's
conversation with the drunken bookbinder whom we know as John B. Gough,
the apostle of temperance. Witness Moffat's words that changed David
Livingstone, the weaver, into David Livingstone, the savior of Africa.
Witness Garibaldi's words fashioning the Italian mob into the
conquering army. Witness Garrison and Beecher and Phillips and John
Bright. Rivers, winds, forces of fire and steam are impotent compared
to those energies of mind and heart, that make men equal to
transforming whole communities and even nations. Who can estimate the
soul's conscious power? Who can measure the light and heat of last
summer? Who can gather up the rays of the stars? Who can bring
together the odors of last year's orchards? There are no mathematics
for computing the influence of man's voluntary thought, affection and
aspiration upon his fellows.
Man has also an unpurposed influence. Power goes forth without his
distinct volition. Like all centers of energy, the soul does its best
work automatically. The sun does not think of lifting the mist from
the ocean, yet the vapor moves skyward. Often man is ignorant of what
he accomplishes upon his fellows, but the results are the same. He is
surcharged with energy. Accomplishing much by plan, he does more
through unconscious weight of personality. In wonder-words we are told
the apostle purposely wrought deeds of mercy upon the poor. Yet
through his shadow falling on the weak and sick as he passed by, he
unconsciously wrought health and hope in men. In like manner it is
said that while Jesus Christ was seeking to comfort the comfortless,
involuntarily virtue went out of him to strengthen one who did but
touch the hem of his garment. Character works with or without consent.
The selfish man fills his office with a malign atmosphere; his very
presence chills like a cold, clammy day. Suspicious people fill all
the circle in which they live with envy and jealousy. Moody men
distribute gloom and depression; hopelessness drains off high spirits
as cold iron draws the heat from the hand. Domineering men provoke
rebellion and breed endless irritations.
Great hearts there are also among men; they carry a volume of manhood;
their presence is sunshine, their coming changes our climate; they oil
the bearings of life; their shadow always falls behind them; they make
right living easy. Blessed are the happiness-makers!--they represent
the best forces in civilization. They are to the heart and home what
the honeysuckle is to the door over which it clings. These embodied
gospels interpret Christianity. Jenny Lind explains a sheet of printed
music--and a royal Christian heart explains, and is more than a creed.
Little wonder, when Christianity is incarnated in a mother, that the
youth worships her as though she were an angel. Someone has likened a
church full of people to a box of unlighted candles; latent light is
there; if they were only kindled and set burning they would be lights
indeed. What God asks for is luminous Christians and living gospels.
This is fame. Life hath no holier ambition. Some there are who,
denied opportunity, have sought out those ambitious to learn, and,
educating them, have sent their own personality out through artists,
jurists or authors they have trained. Herein is the test of the
greatness of editor or statesman or merchant. He has so incarnated his
ideas or methods in his helpers that, while his body is one, his spirit
has many-shaped forms; so that his journal, or institution, or party
feels no jar nor shock in his death, but moves quietly forward because
he is still here living and working in those into whom his spirit is
incarnated. Death ends the single life, but our multiplied life in
others survives.
"A man was born, not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of
others, like the noble rock maple, which, all round our villages,
bleeds for the service of man."--_Emerson_.
CHAPTER II.
The oases in the Arabian desert lie under the lee of long ridges of
rock. The high cliffs extending from north to south are barriers
against the drifting sand. Standing on the rocky summit the seer
Isaiah beheld a sea whose yellow waves stretched to the very horizon.
By day the winds were still, for the pitiless Asiatic sun made the
desert a furnace whose air rose upward. But when night falls the wind
rises. Then the sand begins to drift. Soon every object lies buried
under yellow flakes. Anon, sandstorms arise. Then the sole hope for
man is to fall upon his face; the sky rains bullets. Then appears the
ministry of the rocks. They stay the drifting sand. To the yellow sea
they say: "Thus far, but no farther." Desolation is held back. Soon
the land under the lee of the rocks becomes rich. It is fed by springs
that seep out of the cliffs. It becomes a veritable oasis with figs
and olives and vineyards and aromatic shrubs. Here dwell the sheik and
his flocks. Hither come the caravans seeking refreshment. In all the
Orient no spot so beautiful as the oasis under the shadow of the rocks.
Long centuries ago, while Isaiah rejoiced under the beneficent ministry
of these cliffs, his thoughts went out from dead rocks to living men.
In his vision he saw good men as Great Hearts, to whom crowded close
the weak and ignorant, seeking protection. Sheltered thereby barren
lives were nourished into bounty and beauty. With leaping heart and
streaming eyes he cried out; "O, what a desert is life but for the
ministry of the higher manhood! To what shall I liken a good man? A
man shall be as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; a shelter
in the time of storm!"
A journey among men is like a journey through some land after the
cyclone has made the village a heap and the harvest fields a waste. An
outlook upon the generations reminds us of a highway along which the
retreating army has passed, leaving abandoned guns and silent cannon
with men dead and dying. Travelers from tropical Mexico describe
ruined cities and lovely villages away from which civilized men
journey, leaving temples and terraced gardens to moss and ivy. The
deserted valleys are rich in tropic fruits and the climate soft and
gentle. Yet Aztecs left the garden to journey northward into the
deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Often for the soul paradise is not
before, but behind.
That Infinite Being who hath made man in his own image hath endowed the
soul with full power to transform the desert into an oasis. The soul
carries wondrous implements. It is given to reason to carry fertility
where ignorance and fear and superstition have wrought desolation. It
is given to inventive skill to search out wellsprings and smite rocks
into living water. It is given to affection to hive sweetness like
honeycombs. It is given to wit and imagination to produce perpetual
joy and gladness. It is given to love in the person of a Duff, a
Judson, and a Xavier to transform dark continents. Great is the power
of love! "No abandoned boy in the city, no red man in the mountains,
no negro in Africa can resist its sweet solicitude. It undermines like
a wave, it rends like an earthquake, it melts like a fire, it inspires
like music, it binds like a chain, it detains like a good story, it
cheers like a sunbeam." No other power is immeasurable. For things
have only partial influence over living men. Forests, fields, skies,
tools, occupations, industries--these all stop in the outer court of
the soul. It is given to affection alone to enter the sacred inner
precincts. But once the good man comes his power is irresistible.
Witness Arnold among the schoolboys at Rugby. Witness Garibaldi and
his peasant soldiers. Witness the Scottish chief and his devoted clan.
Witness artist pupils inflamed by their masters. What a noble group is
that headed by Horace Mann, Garrison, Phillips and Lincoln! General
Booth belongs to a like group. What a ministry of mercy and fertility
and protection have these great hearts wrought! Great hearts become a
shelter in time of storm.
All social reforms begin with some great heart. Much now is being said
of the destitution in the poorer districts of great cities. Dante saw
a second hell deeper than hell itself. Each great modern city hath its
inferno. Here dwell costermongers, rag-pickers and street-cleaners;
here the sweater hath his haunts. Huge rookeries and tenements, whose
every brick exudes filth, teem with miserable folk. Each room has one
or more families, from the second cellar at the bottom to the garret at
the top. No greensward, no park, no blade of grass. Whole districts
are as bare of beauty as an enlarged ash-heap. Here children are
"spawned, not born, and die like flies." Here men and women grow
bitter. Here anarchy grows rank. And to such a district in one great
city has gone a man of the finest scholarship and the highest position,
to become the friend of the poor. With him is his bosom friend, having
wealth and culture, with pictures, marbles and curios. Every afternoon
they invite several hundred poor women to spend an hour in the
conservatory among the flowers. Every evening with stereopticon they
take a thousand boys or men upon a journey to Italy or Egypt or Japan.
The kindergartens, public schools and art exhibits cause these women
and children to forget for a time their misery. One hour daily is
redeemed from sorrow to joy by beautiful things and kindly
surroundings. Love and sympathy have sheltered them from life's fierce
heat. Bitter lives are slowly being sweetened. Springs are being
opened in the desert. These great hearts have become "the shadow of a
great rock in a weary land."
Wasting his fortune this youth wasted also his friendships. One man
loved him for his father's sake. For several years every Saturday
night witnessed this man of oak and rock going from den to den looking
for his old friend's boy. One day he wrote the youth a letter telling
him, whether or not he found him, so long as he lived he would be
looking for him every Saturday night in hope of redeeming him again to
integrity. What nothing else could do love did. Kindness wrought its
miracle. Clasping hands the man and boy climbed back again to the
heights. At first the integrity was at best a poor, sickly plant. But
his friend was a refuge in time of storm. A good man became the shadow
of a great rock in life's weary land.
Superiority is to make erring men unerring and slow minds swift. Then,
indeed, comes the better day--pray God it be not far off--when strength
uses its wealth as the net of the sacred fisher to gather souls of men
out of the deep.
"The great idea that the Bible is the history of mankind's deliverance
from all tyranny, outward as well as inward, of the Jews, as the one
free constitutional people among a world of slaves and tyrants, of
their ruin, as the righteous fruit of a voluntary return to despotism;
of the New Testament, as the good news that freedom, brotherhood,
equality, once confided only to Judea and to Greece, and dimly seen
even there, was henceforth to be the right of all mankind, the law of
all society--who was there to tell me that? Who is there now to go
forth and tell it to the millions who have suffered and doubted and
despaired like me, and turn the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom
of the just, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come? Again
I ask--who will go forth and preach that gospel and save his native
land?"--_Charles Kingsley, "Alton Locke._"
CHAPTER III.
To Abraham Lincoln also came the word: "Give and thou shall receive!"
Sitting in the White House the President proclaimed equal rights to
black and white. Then, with shouts of joy, three million slaves
entered the temple of liberty. But they bore the emancipator upon
their shoulders and enshrined him forever in the temple of fame, where
he who gave bountifully shall receive bountiful honor through all the
ages. There, too, in the far-off past stands an uplifted cross.
Flinging wide his arms this crowned sufferer sought to lift the world
back to his Father's side. In life he gave his testimony against
hypocrisy, Phariseeism and cruelty. For years he gave himself to the
publican, the sinner, the prodigal, the poor in mind or heart, and so
came at length to his pitiless execution. But, having given himself in
abandon of love, the world straightway gave itself in return. Every
one of his twelve disciples determined to achieve a violent death for
the Christ who gave himself for them. Paul was beheaded in Rome. John
was tortured in Patmos. Andrew and James were crucified in Asia. The
rest were mobbed, or stoned, or tortured to death. And as years sped
on man kept giving. Multitudes went forth, burning for him in the
tropics, freezing for him in the arctics; threading for him the forest
paths, braving for him the swamps, that they might serve his little
ones. He gave himself for the world, and the world, in a passion of
love, will yet give itself back to him.
This principle tells us why nature and society are so prodigal with
treasures to some men and so niggardly to others. What a different
thing a forest is to different men! He who gives the ax receives a
mast. He who gives taste receives a picture. He who gives imagination
receives a poem. He who gives faith hears the "goings of God in the
tree-tops." The charcoal-burner fronts an oak for finding out how many
cords of wood are in it, as the Goths of old fronted peerless temples
for estimating how many huts they could quarry from the stately
pile.[1] But an artist curses the woodsman for making the tree food
for ax and saw. It has become to him as sacred as the cathedral within
which he bares his head. It is a temple where birds praise God. It is
a harp with endless music for the summer winds. It fills his eye with
beauty and his ear with rustling melodies.
For other multitudes the earth has become only a huge stable; its fruit
fodder; its granaries ricks, out of which men-cattle feed. These
estimate a man's value according as he has lifted his ax upon tall
trees and ravaged all the loveliness of creation; whose curse is the
Nebuchadnezzar curse, giving to nature the tongue and hand, and
receiving from nature grass; who are doomed to love the corn they
grind, to hear only the roar of the whirlwind and the crash of the
hail, never "the still small voice;" who see what is written in
lamp-black and lightning; who think the clouds are for rain, and know
not that they are chariots, thrones and celestial highways; that the
sunset means something else than sleep, and the morning suggests
something other than work. All these give nature only thought for
food, and food only shall they receive from nature, until all their
deeds are plowed down in dust. Give forth thy gift, young men and
maidens, and according as thou givest thou shalt receive fruit, or
picture, or poem, or temple, or ladder let down from heaven, or angel
aspirations going up.
Conscience also receives its gifts and makes a return. Give thy body
obedience and it will return happiness and health. Give overdrafts and
excesses and it will return sleepless nights and suffering days. Man's
sins are seeds, his sufferings harvests. Every action is embryonic,
and according as it is right or wrong will ripen into sweet fruits of
pleasure or poison fruits of pain. Some seeds hold two germs; and vice
and penalty are wrapped up under one covering. Sins are
self-registering and penalties are automatic. The brain keeps a double
set of books, and at last visits its punishments. Conscience does not
wait for society to ferret out iniquity, but daily executes judgment.
Policemen may slumber and the judge may nod, but the nerves are always
active, memory never sleeps, conscience is never off duty. The recoil
of the gun bruises black the shoulder of him who holds it, and sin is a
weapon that kills at both ends.
In the olden days, when the poisoner was in every palace, the Doge of
Venice offered a reward for a crystal goblet that would break the
moment a poison touched it. Perhaps the idea was suggested to the
Prince because his soul already fulfilled the thought, for one drop of
sin always shatters the cup of joy and wastes life's precious wine.
How do events interpret this principle! One day Louis, King of France,
was riding in the forest near his gorgeous and guilty palace of
Versailles. He met a peasant carrying a coffin. "What did the man die
of?" asked the King. "Of hunger," answered the peasant. But the sound
of the hunt was in the King's ear, and he forgot the cry of want. Soon
the day came when the King stood before the guillotine, and with mute
appeals for mercy fronted a mob silent as statues, unyielding as stone,
grimly waiting to dip the ends of their pikes in regal blood. He gave
cold looks; he received cold steel.
Marie Antoinette, riding to Notre Dame for her bridal, bade her
soldiers command all beggars, cripples and ragged people to leave the
line of the procession. The Queen could not endure for a brief moment
the sight of those miserable ones doomed to unceasing squalor and
poverty. What she gave others she received herself, for soon, bound in
an executioner's cart, she was riding toward the place of execution
midst crowds who gazed upon her with hearts as cold as ice and hard as
granite. When Foulon was asked how the starving populace was to live
he answered: "Let them eat grass." Afterward, Carlyle says, the mob,
maddened with rage, "caught him in the streets of Paris, hanged him,
stuck his head upon a pike, filled his mouth with grass, amid shouts as
of Tophet from a grass-eating people." What kings and princes gave
they received. This is the voice of nature and conscience: "Behold,
sin crouches at the door!"
This divine principle also explains man's attitude toward his fellows.
The proverb says man makes his own world. Each sees what is in
himself, not what is outside. The jaundiced eye yellows all it
beholds. The chameleon takes its color from the bark on which it
clings. Man gives his color to what his thought is fastened upon. The
pessimist's darkness makes all things dingy. The youth disappointed
with his European trip said he was a fool for going. He was, for the
reason that he was a fool before he started. He saw nothing without,
because he had no vision within. He gave no sight, he received no
vision. An artist sees in each Madonna that which compels a rude mob
to uncover in prayer, but the savage perceives only a colored canvas.
Recently a foreign traveler, writing of his impressions of our city,
described it to his fellows as a veritable hades. But his fellow
countryman, in a similar volume, recorded his impressions of our art,
architecture and interest in education. Each saw that for which he
looked.
This principle explains man's attitude toward his God. God governs
rocks by force, animals by fear, savage man by force and fear, true men
by hope and love. Man can take God at whatsoever level he pleases. He
who by beastliness turns his body into a log will be held by gravity in
one spot like a log. He who lives on a level with the animals will
receive fear and law and lightnings. He who approaches God through
laws of light and heat and electricity will find the world-throne
occupied by an infinite Agassiz. Some approach God through physical
senses. They behold his storms sinking ships, his tornadoes mowing
down forests. These find him a huge Hercules; yet the Judge who seems
cruel to the wicked criminal may seem the embodiment of gentleness and
kindness to his obedient children. Man determines what God shall be to
him. Each paints his own picture of Deity. Macbeth sees him with
forked lightnings without and volcanic fires within. The pure in heart
see him as the face of all-clasping Love. Give him thy heart and he
will give thee love, effulgent love, like the affection of mother or
lover or friend, only dearer than either. Give him thy ways, and he
will overarch life's path as the heavens overarch the flowers, filling
them with heat by day and yielding cooling dews by night. Give him but
a flickering aspiration and he will give thee balm for the bruised reed
and flame for the smoking flax. Give him the publican's prayer and he
will give thee mercy like the wideness of the sea. Give his little
ones but a cup of cold water and he will give thee to drink of the
water of the river of life and bring thee to the banquet hall in the
house of many mansions.
[1] Mod. Ptrs., Vol. 5, Chap. 1. The Earth--Veil Star papers: A Walk
Among Trees.
CHAPTER IV.
Sometimes it has happened that the brave deed of a single patriot has
rallied wavering hosts, flashed the lightning through the centuries,
and kindled whole nations into a holy enthusiasm. The opposing legions
of soldiers and inquisitors went down before the heroism of the early
church as darkness flees before the advancing sunshine. Society
admires the scholar, but man loves the hero. Wisdom shines, but
bravery inspires and lifts. Though centuries have passed, these noble
deeds still nourish man's bravery and endurance. It was not given to
these leaders to enter into the fruits of their labors. Vicariously
they died. With a few exceptions, their very names remain unknown.
But let us hasten to confess that their vicarious suffering stayed the
onset of despotism and achieved our liberty. They ransomed us from
serfdom and bought our liberty with a great price. Compared to those,
our bravest deeds do seem but brambles to the oaks at whose feet they
grow.
If now we descend from the mountains to explore the secrets of the sea,
Maury and Guyot show us the isles where palm trees wave and man builds
his homes and cities midst rich tropic fruits. There scientists find
that the coral islands were reared above the waves by myriads of living
creatures that died vicariously that man might live. And everywhere
nature exhibits the same sacrificial principle. Our treasures of coal
mean that vast forests have risen and fallen again for our factories
and furnaces. Nobody is richer until somebody is poorer. Evermore the
vicarious exchange is going on. The rock decays and feeds the moss and
lichen. The moss decays to feed the shrub. The shrub perishes that
the tree may have food and growth. The leaves of the tree fall that
its boughs may blossom and bear fruit. The seeds ripen to serve the
birds singing in all the boughs. The fruit falls to be food for man.
The harvests lend man strength for his commerce, his government, his
culture and conscience. The lower dies vicariously that the higher may
live. Thus nature achieves her gifts only through vast expenditures.
It is said that each of the new guns for the navy costs $100,000. But
the gun survives only a hundred explosions, so that every shot costs
$1,000. Tyndall tells us that each drop of water sheathes electric
power sufficient to charge 100,000 Leyden jars and blow the Houses of
Parliament to atoms. Farraday amazes us by his statement of the energy
required to embroider a violet or produce a strawberry. To untwist the
sunbeam and extract the rich strawberry red, to refine the sugar, and
mix its flavor, represents heat sufficient to run an engine from
Liverpool to London or from Chicago to Detroit. But because nature
does her work noiselessly we must not forget that each of her gifts
also involves tremendous expenditure.
To gain his vision of the hills of Paradise, Milton lost his vision of
earth's beauteous sights and scenes. In explanation of the early death
of Raphael and Burns, Keats and Shelley, it has been said that few
great men who are poor have lived to see forty. They bought their
greatness with life itself. A few short years ago there lived in a
western state a boy who came up to his young manhood with a great, deep
passion for the plants and shrubs. While other boys loved the din and
bustle of the city, or lingered long in the library, or turned eager
feet toward the forum, this youth plunged into the fields and forests,
and with a lover's passion for his noble mistress gave himself to roots
and seeds and flowers. While he was still a child he would tell on
what day in March the first violet bloomed; when the first snowdrop
came, and, going back through his years, could tell the very day in
spring when the first robin sang near his window. Soon the boy's
collection of plants appealed to the wonder of scholars. A little
later students from foreign countries began to send him strange flowers
from Japan and seeds from India. One midnight while he was lingering
o'er his books, suddenly the white page before him was as red with his
life-blood as the rose that lay beside his hand. And when, after two
years in Colorado, friends bore his body up the side of the mountains
he so dearly loved, no scholar in all our land left so full a
collection and exposition of the flowers of that distant state as did
this dying boy. His study and wisdom made all to be his debtors. But
he bought his wisdom with thirty years of health and happiness. We are
rich only because the young scholar, with his glorious future, for our
sakes made himself poor.
Only a few centuries ago the liberty of thought was unknown. All lips
were padlocked. The public criticism of a baron meant the confiscation
of the peasant's land; the criticism of the pope meant the dungeon; the
criticism of the king meant death. Now all are free to think for
themselves, to sift all knowledge and public teachings, to cast away
the chaff and to save the precious wheat. But to buy this freedom
blood has flowed like rivers and tears have been too cheap to count.
To achieve these two principles, called liberty of thought and liberty
of speech, some four thousand battles have been fought. In exchange,
therefore, for one of these principles of freedom and happiness,
society has paid--not cash down, but blood down; vital treasure for
staining two thousand battle-fields. To-day the serf has entered into
citizenship and the slave into freedom, but the pathway along which the
slave and serf have moved has been over chasms filled with the bodies
of patriots and hills that have been leveled by heroes' hands. Why are
the travelers through the forests dry and warm midst falling rains?
Why are sailors upon all seas comfortable under their rubber coats?
Warm are they and dry midst all storms, because for twenty years
Goodyear, the discoverer of India rubber, was cold and wet and hungry,
and at last, broken-hearted, died midst poverty.
And why did the representatives of five great nations come together to
destroy the slave trade in Africa, and from every coast come the
columns of light to journey toward the heart of the dark continent and
rim all Africa around with little towns and villages that glow like
lighthouses for civilization? Because one day Westminster Abbey was
crowded with the great men of England, in the midst of whom stood two
black men who had brought Livingstone's body from the jungles of
Africa. There, in the great Abbey, faithful Susi told of the hero who,
worn thin as parchment through thirty attacks of the African fever,
refused Stanley's overtures, turned back toward Ulala, made his ninth
attempt to discover the head-waters of the Nile and search out the
secret lairs of the slave-dealers, only to die in the forest, with no
white man near, no hand of sister or son to cool his fevered brow or
close his glazing eyes. Faithful to the last to that which had been
the great work of his life, he wrote these words with dying hand: "All
I can add in my solitude is, may heaven's rich blessings come down on
every one who would help to heal this open sore of the world!" Why was
it that in the ten years after Livingstone's death, Africa made greater
advancement than in the previous ten centuries? All the world knows
that it was through the vicarious suffering of one of Scotland's
noblest heroes. And why is it that Curtis says that there are three
American orations that will live in history--Patrick Henry's at
Williamsburg, Abraham Lincoln's at Gettysburg and Wendell Philips' at
Faneuil Hall? A thousand martyrs to liberty lent eloquence to Henry's
lips; the hills of Gettysburg, all billowy with our noble dead, exhaled
the memories that anointed Lincoln's lips; while Lovejoy's spirit,
newly martyred at Alton, poured over Wendell Phillips' nature the full
tides of speech divine. Vicarious suffering explains each of these
immortal scenes.
Long, too, the scroll of humble heroes whose vicarious services have
exalted our common life. Recognizing this principle, Cicero built a
monument to his slave, a Greek, who daily read aloud to his master,
took notes of his conversation, wrote out his speeches and so lent the
orator increased influence and power. Scott also makes one of his
characters bestow a gift upon an aged servant. For, said the warrior,
no master can ever fully recompense the nurse who cares for his
children, or the maid who supplies their wants. To-day each giant of
the industrial realm is compassed about with a small army of men who
stand waiting to carry out his slightest behests, relieve him of
details, halve his burdens, while at the same time doubling his joys
and rewards. Lifted up in the sight of the entire community the great
man stands on a lofty pedestal builded out of helpers and aids. And
though here and now the honors and successes all go to the one giant,
and his assistants are seemingly obscure and unrecognized, hereafter
and there honors will be evenly distributed, and then how will the
great man's position shrink and shrivel!
Here also are the parents who loved books and hungered for beauty, yet
in youth were denied education and went all their life through
concealing a secret hunger and ambition, but who determined that their
children should never want for education. That the boy, therefore,
might go to college, these parents rose up early to vex the soil and
sat up late to wear their fingers thin, denying the eye beauty, denying
the taste and imagination their food, denying the appetite its
pleasures. And while they suffer and wane the boy in college grows
wise and strong and waxing great, comes home to find the parents
overwrought with service and ready to fall on death, having offered a
vicarious sacrifice of love.
And here are our own ancestors. Soon our children now lying in the
cradles of our state will without any forethought of theirs fall heir
to this rich land with all its treasures material--houses and
vineyards, factories and cities; with all its treasures mental--library
and gallery, school and church, institutions and customs. But with
what vicarious suffering were these treasures purchased! For us our
fathers subdued the continents and the kingdoms, wrought freedom,
stopped the mouths of wolves, escaped the sword of savages, turned to
flight armies of enemies, subdued the forests, drained the swamps,
planted vineyards, civilized savages, reared schoolhouses, builded
churches, founded colleges. For four generations they dwelt in cabins,
wore sheepskins and goatskins, wandered about exploring rivers and
forests and mines, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, because of
their love of liberty, and for the slave's sake were slain with the
sword--of whom this generation is not worthy. "And these all died not
having received the promise," God having reserved that for us to whom
it has been given to fall heir to the splendid achievements of our
Christian ancestors.
And what shall we more say, save only to mention those whose early
death as well as life was vicarious? What an enigma seems the career
of those cut off while yet they stand upon life's threshold! How proud
they made our hearts, standing forth all clothed with beauty, health
and splendid promise! What a waste of power, what a robbery of love,
seemed their early death! But slowly it has dawned upon us that the
footsteps that have vanished walk with us more frequently than do our
nearest friends. And the sound of the voice that is still instructs us
in our dreams as no living voice ever can. The invisible children and
friends are the real children. Their memory is a golden cord binding
us to God's throne, and drawing us upward into the kingdom of light.
Absent, they enrich us as those present cannot. And so the child who
smiled upon us and then went away, the son and the daughter whose
talents blossomed here to bear fruit above, the sweet mother's face,
the father's gentle spirit--their going it was that set open the door
of heaven and made on earth a new world. These all lived vicariously
for us, and vicariously they died!
With God also penalties are warnings. His punishments are thorn
hedges, safeguarding man from the thorns and thickets where serpents
brood, and forcing his feet back into the ways of wisdom and peace.
For man's integrity and happiness, therefore, conscience smites and is
smiting unceasingly. Therefore, Eugene Aram dared not trust himself
out under the stars at night, for these stars were eyes that blazed and
blazed and would not relent. But why did not the murderer, Eugene
Aram, forgive himself? When Lady Macbeth found that the water in the
basin would not wash off the red spots, but would "the multitudinous
seas incarnadine," why did not Macbeth and his wife forgive each other?
Strange, passing strange, that Shakespeare thought volcanic fires
within and forked lightning without were but the symbols of the storm
that breaks upon the eternal orb of each man's soul. If David cannot
forgive himself, if Peter cannot forgive Judas, who can forgive sins?
"Perhaps the gods may," said Plato to Socrates. "I do not know,"
answered the philosopher. "I do not know that it would be safe for the
gods to pardon." So the poet sends Macbeth out into the black night
and the blinding storm to be thrown to the ground by forces that twist
off trees and hiss among the wounded boughs and bleeding branches.
For poor Jean Valjean, weeping bitterly for his sins, while he watched
the boy play with the buttercups and prayed that God would give him,
the red and horny-handed criminal, to feel again as he felt when he
pressed his dewy cheek against his mother's knee--for Jean Valjean is
there no suffering friend, no forgiving heart? Is there no bosom where
poor Magdalene can sob out her bitter confession? What if God were the
soul's father! What if he too serves and suffers vicariously! What if
his throne is not marble but mercy! What if nature and life do but
interpret in the small this divine principle existing in the large in
him who is infinite! [1] What if Calvary is God's eternal heartache,
manifest in time! What if, sore-footed and heavy-hearted, bruised with
many a fall, we should come back to the old home, from which once we
fled away, gay and foolish prodigals! The time was when, as small boys
and girls, with blinding tears, we groped toward the mother's bosom and
sobbed out our bitter pain and sorrow with the full story of our sin.
What if the form on Calvary were like the king of eternity, toiling up
the hill of time, his feet bare, his locks all wet with the dew of
night, while he cries: "Oh, Absalom! my son, my son, Absalom!" What if
we are Absalom, and have hurt God's heart! Reason staggers. Groping,
trusting, hoping, we fall blindly on the stairs that slope through
darkness up to God. But, falling, we fall into the arms of Him who
hath suffered vicariously for man from the foundation of the world.
"Paul says: 'I am a debtor.' But what had he received from the Greeks
that he was bound to pay back? Was he a disciple of their philosophy?
He was not. Had he received from their bounty in the matter of art?
No. One of the most striking things in history is the fact that Paul
abode in Athens and wrote about it, without having any impression made
upon his imaginative mind, apparently, by its statues, its pictures or
its temples. The most gorgeous period of Grecian art poured its light
on his path, and he never mentioned it. The New Testament is as dead
to art-beauty as though it had been written by a hermit in an Egyptian
pyramid who had never seen the light of sun. Then what did he owe the
Greeks? Not philosophy, not art, and certainly not religion, which was
fetichism. Not a debt of literature, nor of art, nor of civil polity;
not a debt of pecuniary obligation; not an ordinary debt. He had
nothing from all these outside sources. The whole barbaric world was
without the true knowledge of God. He had that knowledge and he owed
it to every man who had it not. All the civilized world was, in these
respects, without the true inspiration; and he owed it to them simply
because they did not have it; and his debt to them was founded on this
law of benevolence of which I have been speaking, which is to supersede
selfishness, and according to which those who have are indebted to
those who have not the world over."--_Henry Ward Beecher_.
CHAPTER V.
Booksellers rank "Quo Vadis" as one of the most popular books of the
day. In that early era persecution was rife and cruelty relentless.
It was the time of Caligula, who mourned that the Roman people had not
one neck, so that he could cut it off at a single blow; of Nero, whose
evening garden parties were lighted by the forms of blazing Christians;
of Vespasian, who sewed good men in skins of wild beasts to be worried
to death by dogs. In that day faith and death walked together.
When the flames of persecution had swept by and, for a time, good men
had respite, Apollos recalled with joy the heroism of those without the
prison who remembered the bonds of those within. With leaping heart he
called before his mind the vast multitudes in all ages who so fettered
through life--men bound by poverty and hedged in by ignorance; men
baffled and beaten in life's fierce battle, bearing burdens of want and
wretchedness, and by the heroism of the past he urged all men
everywhere to fulfill that law of sympathy that makes hard tasks easy
and heavy burdens light. Let the broad shoulders stoop to lift the
load with weakness; let the wise and refined share the sorrows of the
ignorant; let those whose health and gifts make them the children of
freedom be abroad daily on missions of mercy to those whose feet are
fettered; so shall life be redeemed out of its woe and want and sin
through the Christian sympathy of those who "remember men in the bonds
as bound with them."
Here is Sir William Napier writing, "I am now old and feeble and
miserable; my eyes are dim, very dim, with weeping for my lost child,"
and went on bound midst the thick shadows. Or here are the man and
woman, set each to each like perfect music unto noble words, and one is
taken--but Robert Browning was left to dwell in such sorrow that for a
time he could not see his pen for the thick darkness. Here is the
youth who by one sin fell out of man's regard, and struggling upward,
found it was a far cry back to the lost heights, and wrote the story of
his broken life in the song of "the bird with the broken pinion, that
never flew as high again." Sooner or later each life passes under
bondage. For all strength will vanish as the morning dew our joys take
wings and flit away; the eye dim, the ear dull, the thought decay, our
dearest die. Oft life's waves and billows chill us to the very marrow,
while we gasp and shiver midst the surging tide. Then it is a blessed
thing to look out through blinding tears upon a friendly face, to feel
the touch of a friendly hand and to know there are some who "remember
those in bonds, as bound with them."
Now this principle of social sympathy and liability gives us the secret
of all the epoch-making men of our time. Carlyle once called Ruskin
"the seer that guides his generation." More recently a prominent
philanthropist said: "All our social reform movements are largely the
influence of John Ruskin." How earned this man such meed of praise?
Upon John Ruskin fortune poured forth all her gifts. He was born the
child of supreme genius. He was heir to nearly a million dollars, and
by his pen earned a fortune in addition. At the age of 21, when most
young men were beginning their reading, he completed a book that put
his name and fame in every man's mouth. "For a thousand who can speak,
there is but one who can think; for a thousand who can think, there is
but one who can see," and to this youth was given the open vision. In
the hour of fame the rich and great vied to do him honor, and every
door opened at his touch. But he turned aside to become the
knight-errant of the poor. Walking along Whitechapel road he saw
multitudes of shopmen and shopwomen whose stint was eighty hours a
week, who toiled mid poisoned air until the brain reeled, the limbs
trembled, and worn out physically and mentally they succumbed to spinal
disease or premature age, leaving behind only enfeebled progeny, until
the city's streets became graves of the human physique. In that hour
London seemed to him like a prison or hospital; nor was it given to him
to play upon its floor as some rich men do, knitting its straw into
crowns that please; clutching at its dust in the cracks of the floor,
to die counting the motes by millions. The youth "remembered men in
bonds as bound with them." He tithed himself a tenth, then a third,
then a half, and at length used up his fortune in noble service. He
founded clubs for workingmen and taught them industry, honor and
self-reliance. He bought spinning-wheels and raw flax, and made pauper
women self-supporting. He founded the Sheffield Museum, and placed
there his paintings and marbles, that workers in iron and steel might
have the finest models and bring all their handiwork up toward beauty.
He asked his art-students in Oxford to give one hour each day to
pounding stones and filling holes in the street. When his health gave
way Arnold Toynbee, foreman of his student gang, went forth to carry
his lectures on the industrial revolution up and down the land.
Falling on hard days and evil tongues and lying customs, he wore
himself out in knightly service. So he gained his place among "the
immortals." But the secret of his genius and influence is this: He
fulfilled the debt of strength and the law of social sympathy and
service.
Fascinating, also, the life-story of that fair, sweet girl who married
Audubon. Yearning for her own home, yet finding that her husband would
journey a thousand miles and give months to studying the home and
haunts of a bird, she gave up her heart-dreams and went with him into
the forest, dwelling now in tents, and now in some rude cabin, being a
wanderer upon the face of the earth--until, when children came, she
remained behind and dwelt apart. At last the naturalist came home
after long absence to fulfill the long-cherished dream of years of
quiet study with wife and children, but found that the mice had eaten
his drawings and destroyed the sketches he had left behind. Then was
he dumb with grief and dazed with pain, but it was his brave wife who
led him to the gate and thrust him forth into the forest and sent him
out upon his mission, saying that there was no valley so deep nor no
wilderness so distant but that his thought, turning homeward, would see
the light burning brightly for him. And in those dark days when our
land trembled, and a million men from the north tramped southward and a
million men from the south tramped northward, and the columns met with
a concussion that threatened to rend the land asunder, there, in the
battle, midst the din and confusion and blood, women walked, angels of
light and mercy, not merely holding the cup of cold water to famished
lips, or stanching the life-blood until surgeons came, but teaching
soldier boys in the dying hour the way through the valley and beyond it
up the heavenly hills. These all fulfilled their mission and
"remembered those in bonds as bound with them."
This principle also has been and is the spring of all progress in
humanity and civilization. Our journalists and orators pour forth
unstinted praise upon the achievements of the nineteenth century. But
in what realm lies our supremacy? Not in education, for our schools
produce no such thinkers or universal scholars as Plato and his
teacher; not in eloquence, for our orators still ponder the periods of
the oration "On the Crown;" not in sculpture or architecture, for the
broken fragments of Phidias are still models for our youth. The nature
of our superiority is suggested when we speak of the doing away with
the exposure of children, the building of homes, hospitals and asylums
for the poor and weak; the caring for the sick instead of turning them
adrift; the support of the aged instead of burying them alive; the
diminished frequency of wars; the disappearance of torture in obtaining
testimony; humanity toward the shipwrecked, where once luring ships
upon the rocks was a trade; the settlement of disputes by umpires and
of national differences by arbitration.
Humanity and social sympathy are the glory of our age. Society has
come to remember that those in bonds are bound by them. Indeed, the
application of this principle to the various departments of human life
furnishes the historian with the milestones of human progress. The age
of Sophocles was not shocked when the poet wrote the story of the child
exposed by the wayside to be adopted by some passer-by, or torn in
pieces by wild dogs, or chilled to death in the cold. When the wise
men brought their gold and frankincense to the babe in the manger, men
felt the sacredness of infancy. As the light from the babe in
Correggio's "Holy Night" illumined all the surrounding figures, so the
child resting in the Lord's arms for shelter and sacred benediction
began to shed luster upon the home and to lead the state. To-day the
nurture and culture in the schools are society's attempt to remember
the little ones in bonds. Fulfilling the same law Xavier, with his
wealth and splendid talents, remembered bound ones and journeyed
through India, penetrating all the Eastern lands, being physician for
the sick, nurse for the dying, minister for the ignorant; his face
benignant; his eloquence, love; his atmosphere, sympathy; carrying his
message of peace to the farther-most shores of the Chinese Sea, through
his zeal for "those who were in bonds." And thus John Howard visited
the prisons of Europe for cleansing these foul dens and wiped from the
sword of justice its most polluting stain. Fulfilling the debt of
strength, Wilberforce and Garrison, Sumner and Brown, fronted furious
slave-holders, enduring every form of abuse and vituperation and
personal violence, and destroyed the infamous traffic in human flesh.
Forgetting this, some poor look upon the rich as enemies and desire to
pillage their property, and some rich have only epithets for the poor.
Now, wise men know that there is no separation of rich industrious
classes and the poor industrious classes, for they differ only as do
two branches of one tree. This year one bough is full of bloom, and
the other bears only scantily, but next year the conditions will be
reversed. Wealth and poverty are like waves; what is now crest will
soon be trough. Such conditions demand forbearance and mutual
sympathy. Some men are born with little and some with large skill for
acquiring wealth, the two differing as the scythe that gathers a
handful of wheat differs from the reaper built for vast harvests and
carrying the sickle of success. For generations the ancestors back of
one man's father were thrifty and the ancestors back of his mother were
far-sighted, and the two columns met in him, and like two armies joined
forces for a vast campaign for wealth. Beside him is a brother, whose
thoughts and dreams go everywhither with the freedom of an eagle, but
who walks midst practical things with the eagle's halting gait. The
strong one was born, not for spoiling his weaker brother, but to guard
and guide and plan for him.
This is the lesson of nature--the strong must bear the burdens of the
weak. To this end were great men born. Nature constantly exhibits
this principle. The shell of the peach shelters the inner seed; the
outer petals of the bud the tender germ; the breast of the mother-bird
protects the helpless birdlets; the eagle flies under her young and
gently eases them to the ground; above the babe's helplessness rise the
parents' shield and armor. God appoints strong men, the industrial
giants, to protect the weak and poor. The laws of helpfulness ask them
to forswear a part of their industrial rights; and they fulfill their
destiny only by fulfilling the debt of strength to weakness.
To identify one's self with those in bonds is the very core of the
Christian life. Not an intellectual belief within, not a form of
worship without, but sympathetic helpfulness betokens the true
Christian. God, who hath endowed the soul with capacity to endure all
labors and pains for wealth, to consume away the very springs of life
for knowledge, hath also given it power for pouring itself out in great
resistless tides of love and sympathy. For beauty and royal majesty
nothing else is comparable to the love of some royal nature. A loving
heart exhales sweet odors like an alabaster box; it pours forth joy
like a sweet harp; it flashes beauty like a casket of gems; it cheers
like a winter's fire; it carries sweet stimulus like returning
sunshine. We have all known a few great-hearted men and women who have
through years distributed their love-treasures among the little
children of the community and scattered affection among the poor and
the weak, until the entire community comes to feel that it lives in
them and without them will die. Happy the man who hath stored up such
treasures of mind and heart as that he stands forth among his fellows
like a lighthouse on some ledge, sending guiding rays far out o'er dark
and troubled seas. Happy the woman whose ripened affection and
inspiration have permeated the common life until to her come the poor
and weak and heart-broken, standing forth like some beauteous bower
offering shade and filling all the air with sweet perfume.
In crisis hours the patriot and martyr, the hero and the
philanthropist, die for the public good, but not less do they serve
their fellows who live and through years employ their gifts and
heart-treasures, not for themselves, but for the happiness and highest
welfare of others. Richter, the German artist, painted a series of
paintings illustrating the ministry of angels. He showed us the
child-angels who sit talking with mortal children among the flowers,
now holding them by their coats lest they fall upon the stairs, now
with apples enticing them back when they draw too near the precipice;
when the boy grows tall and is tempted, ringing in the chambers of
memory the sweet mother's name; in the hour of death coming in the garb
of pilgrim, made ready for convoy and guidance to the heavenly land.
Oh beautiful pictures! setting forth the sacred ministry of each true
Christian heart.
History tells of the servant whose master was sold into Algeria, and
who sold himself and wandered years in the great desert in the mere
hope of at last finding and freeing his lord; of the obscure man in the
Eastern city who, misunderstood and unpopular, left a will stating that
he had been poor and suffered for lack of water, and so had starved and
slaved through life to build an aqueduct for his native town, that the
poor might not suffer as he had; of the soldier in the battle, wounded
in cheek and mouth and dying of thirst, but who would not drink lest he
should spoil the water for others, and so yielded up his life. But
this capacity of sacrifice and sympathy is but the little in man
answering to what is large in God. Here deep answers unto deep. The
definition of the Divine One is, he remembers those in bonds, and it is
more blessed to give than to receive; more blessed to feed the hungry
than starving to be fed; more blessed to pour light on darkened
misunderstanding than ignorant to be taught; more blessed to open the
path through the wilderness of doubt than wandering to be guided; more
blessed to bring in the bewildered pilgrim than to be lost and rescued;
more blessed to forgive than to be forgiven; to save than to be saved.
To man, therefore, toiling upon his industry, his art, his government,
his religion, comes this reflection: Because the divine epochs are
long, let not the patriot or parent be sick with hope long deferred.
Let the reformer sow his seed untroubled when the sickle rusts in the
hand that waits for its harvest. Remember that as things go up in
value, the period between inception and fruition is protracted.
Because the plant is low, the days between seed and sheaf are few and
short; because the bird is higher, months stand between egg and eagle.
But manhood is a thing so high, culture and character are harvests so
rich as to ask years and even ages for ripening, while God's purposes
for society involve such treasures of art, wisdom, wealth, law,
liberty, as to ask eons and cycles for their full perfection.
Therefore let each patriot and sage, each reformer and teacher be
patient. The world itself is a seed. Not until ages have passed shall
it burst into bloom and blossom.
In the realm of law and liberty the best things ask for patience and
waiting. Out of nothing nothing comes. The institution that
represents little toil but little time endures. Man's early history is
involved in obscurity, largely because his early arts were
mushroomic--completed quickly, they quickly perished. The ideas
scratched upon the flat leaf or the thin reed represented scant labor
and therefore soon were dust. But he who holds in his hand a modern
book holds the fruitage of years many and long. For that book we see
the workmen ranging far for linen; we see the printer toiling upon his
movable types; we see the artist etching his plate; the author giving
his days to study and his nights to reflection; and because the book
harvests the study of a great man's lifetime it endures throughout
generations. The sciences also increase in value only as the time
spent upon them is lengthened. Few and brief were the days required
for the early astronomers to work out the theory that the earth is
flat, the sky a roof, the stars holes in which the gods have hung
lighted lamps. The theory that makes our earth sweep round the sun,
our sun sweep round a far-off star, all lesser groups sweep round one
central sun, that shepherds all the other systems, asks for the toil of
Galileo and Kepler, of Copernicus and Newton, and a great company of
modern students. The father of astronomy had to wait a thousand years
for the fruition of his science. Upon those words, called law or love,
or mother or king, man hath with patience labored. The word wife or
mother is so rich to-day as to make Homer's ideal, Helen, seem poor and
almost contemptible. The girl was very beautiful, but very painful the
alacrity with which she passes from the arms of Menelaus to the arms of
Paris, from the arms of Paris to those of Deiphobus, his conqueror. If
one hour only was required for this lovely creature to pack her
belongings preparatory to moving to the tent of her new lord, one day
fully sufficed for transferring her affections from one prince to
another. But, toiling ever upward to her physical beauty, woman added
mental beauty, moral beauty, until the word wife or mother or home came
to have almost infinite wealth of meaning.
In government also the best political instruments ask for longest time.
Hercules ruled by the right of physical strength. Assembling the
people, he challenged all rivals to combat. A single hour availed for
cutting off the head of his enemy. Henceforth he reigned an
unchallenged king. Because man hath with patience toiled long upon
this republic, how rich and complex its institutions! The modern
presidency does not represent the result of an hour's combat between
two Samsons. Forty years ago the eager aspirants began their struggle.
A great company of young men all over the land determined to build up a
reputation for patriotism, statesmanship, wisdom and character. As the
time for selecting a president approached, the people passed in review
all these leaders. When two or more were finally chosen out, there
followed months in which the principles of the candidates were sifted
and analyzed. "I know of no more sublime spectacle," said Stuart Mill,
"than the election of the ruler under the laws of the republic. If the
voice of the people is ever the voice of God, if any ruler rules by
divine right, it is when millions of freemen, after long consideration,
elect one man to be their appointed guide and leader." If a single
hour availed for Samson to settle the question of his sovereignty, free
institutions ask for their statesmen to have the patience of years;
working, they must also wait.
With long patience also man has worked and waited as he has toiled upon
his idea of religion. Rude, indeed, man's hasty thoughts of the
infinite. In early days the sun was God's eye, the thunder his voice,
the stroke of the earthquake the stroke of his arm, the harvest
indicated his pleasure, the pestilence his anger. In such an age the
priest and philosopher taxed their genius to invent methods of
preserving the friendship and avoiding the anger of the Infinite.
Daily the king and general calculated how many sheep and oxen they must
slay to avoid defeat in battle. Daily the husbandman and farmer
calculated how many doves and lambs must be killed to avert blight from
the vineyard and hailstorms from the harvests. Observing that when the
king ascended to the throne the slaves put their necks under his heel
and covered their bodies with dust, in their haste the priests
concluded that by degrading man God would be exalted. Prostrating
themselves in dirt and rags, men went down in order that by contrast
the throne of God might rise up. The mud was made thick upon man's
brow that the crown upon the brow of God might be made brilliant. Out
of this degrading thought grew the idea that God lived and ruled for
his own gratification and self-glory. The infinite throne was unveiled
as a throne of infinite self-aggrandizement. Slowly it was perceived
that the parent who makes all things move about himself as a center,
ever monopolizing the best food, the best place, the best things, at
last becomes a monster of selfishness and suffers an awful degradation,
while he who sacrifices himself for others is the true hero.
At last, Christ entered the earthly scene with his golden rule and his
new commandment of love. He unveiled God, not as desiring to be
ministered to, but as ministering; as being rich, yet for man's sake
becoming poor; as asking little, but giving much; as caring for the
sparrow and lily; as waiting upon each beetle, bird and beast, and
caring for each detail of man's life. Slowly the word God increased in
richness. Having found through his telescope worlds so distant as to
involve infinite power, man emptied the idea of omnipotence into the
word GOD; finding an infinite wisdom in the wealth of the summers and
winters, man added the idea of omniscience; noting a certain upward
tendency in society, man added the word, "Providence;" gladdened by
God's mercy, man added ideas of forgiveness and love. Slowly the word
grew. In the olden time people entering the Acropolis cast their gifts
of gold and silver into some vase. Last of all came the prince to
empty in jewels and flashing gems and make the vase to overflow. Not
otherwise Christ emptied vast wealth of meaning into those words called
"conscience," "law," "love," "vicarious suffering," "immortality,"
"God." Beautiful, indeed, the simplicity of Christ. With long
patience, man waited for the unveiling of the face of divine love.
To all patriots and Christian men who seek to use occupation and
profession so as to promote the world's upward growth comes the
reflection that henceforth society's progress must be slow, because its
institutions are high and complex. To-day many look into the future
with shaded eyes of terror. In the social unrest and discontent of our
times timid men see the brewing of a social and industrial storm. In
their alarm, amateur reformers bring in social panaceas, conceived in
haste and born in fear. But God cannot be hurried. His century plants
cannot be forced to blossom in a night. No reformer can be too zealous
for man's progress, though he can be too impatient. In these days,
when civilization has become complex and the fruitage high, those who
work must also wait and with patience endure.
Multitudes are abroad trying to settle the labor problem. The labor
problem will never be settled until the last man lies in the graveyard.
Each new inventor reopens the labor problem. Men were contented with
their wages until Gutenberg invented his type and made books possible;
then straightway every laborer asked an increased wage, that though he
died ignorant his children might be intelligent. When society had
readjusted things and man had obtained the larger wage, Arkwright came,
inventing his new loom, Goodyear came with the use of rubber, and
straightway men asked a new wage to advantage themselves of woolen
garments and rubber goods for miners and sailors. On the morrow
15,000,000 children will enter the schoolroom; before noon the teacher
has given them a new outlook upon some book, some picture, some
convenience, some custom. Each child registers the purpose to go home
immediately and cry to his parent for that book or picture; that tool
or comfort. When the parents return that night the labor question has
been reopened in millions of homes.
Walter Scott tells the story of a wounded knight, who took refuge in
the castle of a baron that proved to be a secret enemy and threw the
knight into a dungeon; one day in his cell the knight heard the sound
of distant music approaching. Drawing near the slit in the tower, he
saw the flash of swords and heard the tramp of marching men. At last
the wounded hero realized that these were his own troops, marching by
in ignorance of the fact that the lord of this castle was also the
jailer of their general. While the knight tugged at his chain, lifted
up his voice and cried aloud, his troops marched on, their music
drowning out his cries. Soon the banners passed from sight, the last
straggler disappeared behind the hill and the captive was left alone.
The brave knight died in his dungeon, but the story of his heroism
lived. What the knight learned in suffering the poets have taught in
song. The captive hero has a permanent place in civilization, though
the foresight of his influence was denied him.
To parents who have passed through all the thunder of life's battle and
stand at the close of life's day discouraged because children are
unripe, thoughtless and immature; to publicists and teachers, sowing
God's precious seed, but denied its harvests; to individuals seeking to
perfect their character within themselves comes this thought--that
character is a harvest so rich as to ask for long waiting and the
courage of far-off results. Nature can perfect physical processes in
twenty years, but long time is asked for teaching the arm skill, the
tongue its grace of speech, to clothe reason with sweetness and light,
to cast error out of the judgment, to teach the will hardness and the
heart hope and endurance.
Four hundred years passed by before the capstone was placed upon the
Cathedral of Cologne, but no trouble requires such patient toil as the
structure of manhood. For complexity and beauty nothing is comparable
to character. Great artists spend years upon a single picture. With a
touch here and a touch there they approach it, and when a long period
hath passed they bring it to completion. Yet all the beauty of
paintings, all the grace of statues, all the grandeur of cathedrals are
as nothing compared to the painting of that inner picture, the
chiseling of that inner manhood, the adornment of that inner temple,
that is scarcely begun when the physical life ends. How majestic the
full disclosure of an ideal manhood! With what patience must man wait
for its completion! Here lies the hope of immortality; it does not yet
appear what man shall be.
"Heart is a word that the Bible is full of. Brain, I believe, is not
mentioned in Scripture. Heart, in the sense in which it is currently
understood, suggests the warm center of human life or any other life.
When we say of a man that he 'has a good deal of heart' we mean that he
is 'summery.' When you come near him it is like getting around to the
south side of a house in midwinter and letting the sunshine feel of
you, and watching the snow slide off the twigs and the tear-drops swell
on the points of pendant icicles. Brain counts for a good deal more
to-day than heart does. It will win more applause and earn a larger
salary. Thought is driven with a curb-bit lest it quicken into a pace
and widen out into a swing that transcends the dictates of good form.
Exuberance is in bad odor. Appeals to the heart are not thought to be
quite in good taste. The current demand is for ideas--not taste. I
asked a member of my church the other day whether he thought a certain
friend of his who attends a certain church and is exceptionally brainy
was really entering into sympathy with religious things. 'Oh, no,' he
said, 'he likes to hear preaching because he has an active mind, and
the way that things are spread out in front of him.' In the old days
of the church a sermon used to convert 3,000 men, now that temperature
is down it takes 3,000 sermons to convert one man."--_Charles H.
Parkhurst_.
CHAPTER VII.
To-day there has sprung up a rivalry between brain and heart. Men are
coming to idolize intellect. Brilliancy is placed before goodness and
intellectual dexterity above fidelity. Intellect walks the earth a
crowned king, while affection and sentiment toil as bond slaves.
Doubtless our scholars, with the natural bias for their own class, are
largely responsible for this worship of intellectuality. When the
historian calls the roll of earth's favorite sons he causes these
immortals to stand forth an army of great thinkers, including
philosophers, scientists, poets, jurists, generals. The great minds
are exalted, the great hearts are neglected.
Artists also have united with authors for strengthening this idolatry
of intellect. One of the great pictures in the French Academy of
Design assembles the immortals of all ages. Having erected a tribunal
in the center of the scene, Delaroche places Intellect upon the throne.
Also, when the sons of genius are assembled about that glowing center,
all are seen to be great thinkers. There stand Democritus, a thinker
about invisible atoms; Euclid, a thinker about invisible lines and
angles; Newton, a thinker about an invisible force named gravity; La
Place, a thinker about the invisible law that sweeps suns and stars
forward toward an unseen goal.
The artist also remembers the inventors whose useful thoughts blossom
into engines and ships; statesmen whose wise thoughts blossom into
codes and constitutions; speakers whose true thoughts blossom into
orations, and artists whose beautiful thoughts appear as pictures. At
this assembly of the immortals great thinkers touch and jostle. But if
the great minds are remembered, no chair is made ready for the great
hearts. He who lingers long before this painting will believe that
brain is king of the world; that great thinkers are the sole architects
of civilization; that science is the only providence for the future;
that God himself is simply an infinite brain, an eternal logic engine,
cold as steel, weaving endless ideas about life and art, about nature
and man.
But the throne of the universe is mercy and not marble; the name of the
world-ruler is Great Heart, rather than Crystalline Mind, and God is
the Eternal Friend who pulsates out through his world those forms of
love called reforms, philanthropies, social bounties and benefactions,
even as the ocean pulsates its life-giving tides into every bay and
creek and river. The springs of civilization are not in the mind. For
the individual and the state, "out of the heart are the issues of life."
What intellect can dream, only the heart realizes! John Cabot's mind
did, indeed, blaze a pathway through the New England forest. But with
burning hearts and iron will the Pilgrim Fathers loved liberty, law and
learning, and soon they broadened the path into a highway for commerce,
turned tepees into temples and made the forests a land of vineyards and
villages. Mind is the beginning of civilization, but the ends and
fruitage thereof are of the heart.
Christopher Wren's intellect wrought out the plan for St. Paul's
Cathedral. But all impotent to realize themselves, these plans, lying
in the King's council chamber grew yellow with age and thick with dust.
One day a great heart stood forth before the people of London, pointing
them to an unseen God, "from whom cometh every good and perfect gift,"
and, plying men with the generosity of God, he asked gifts of gold and
silver and houses and lands, that England might erect a temple worthy
of him "whom the heaven of heavens could not contain." The mind of a
great architect had created a plan and a "blue-print," but eager hearts
inspiring earnest hands turned the plan into granite and hung in the
air a dome of marble.
Thus all the great achievements for civilization are the achievements
of heart. What we call the fine arts are only red-hot ingots of
passion cooled off into visible shape. All high music is emotion
gushing forth at those faucets named musical notes. As unseen vapors
cool into those visible forms named snowflakes, so Gothic enthusiasms
cooled off into cathedrals.
Our art critics speak of the eight great paintings of history. Each of
these masterpieces does but represent a holy passion flung forth upon a
canvas. The reformation also was not achieved by intellect nor
scholarship. Erasmus represents pure mind. Yet his intellect was cold
as winter sunshine that falls upon a snowdrift and dazzles the eyes
with brightness, yet is impotent to unlock the streams, or bore a hole
through the snowdrifts, or release the roots from the grip of ice and
frost, or cover the land with waving harvests. Powerless as winter
sunshine were Erasmus' thoughts. But what the scholar could not do,
Luther, the great heart, wrought easily.
Thus all the reforms represent passions and enthusiasms. That citadel
called "The Divine Right of Kings" was not overthrown by colleges with
books and pamphlets. It was the pulse-beats of the heart of the people
that pounded down the Bastille. Ideas of the iniquity of slavery
floated through our land for three centuries, yet the slave pen and
auction block still cursed our land. At last an enthusiasm for man as
man and a great passion for the poor stood behind these ideas of human
brotherhood, and as powder stands behind the bullet, flinging forth its
weapons, slavery perished before the onslaught of the heart.
The men whose duty it was to follow the line of battle and bury our
dead soldiers tell us that in the dying hour the soldier's hand
unclasped his weapon and reached for the inner pocket to touch some
faded letter; some little keepsake, some likeness of wife or mother.
This pathetic fact tells us that soldiers have won their battles not by
holding before the mind some abstract thought about the rights of man.
The philosopher did, indeed, teach the theory, and the general marked
out the line of attack or defense, but it was love of home and God and
native land that entered into the soldier and made his arm invincible.
Back of the emancipation proclamation stands a great heart named
Lincoln. Back of Africa's new life stands a great heart named
Livingstone. Back of the Sermon on the Mount stands earth's greatest
heart--man's Savior. Christ's truth is enlightening man's ignorance,
but his tears, falling upon our earth, are washing away man's sin and
woe.
Impotent the intellect without the support of the heart. How thickly
are the shores of time strewn with those forms of wreckage called great
thoughts. In those far-off days when the overseers of the Egyptian
King scourged 80,000 slaves forth to their task of building a pyramid,
a great mind discovered the use of steam. Intellect achieved an
instrument for lifting blocks of granite into proper place. In that
hour thought made possible the freedom of innumerable slaves. But the
heart of the tyrant held no love for his bondsmen. The poor seemed of
less worth than cattle. Because the King's heart felt no woes to be
cured, his hand pushed away the engine. A great thought was there, but
not the kindly impulse to use it. Then, full 2,000 years passed over
our earth. At last came an era when man's heart journeyed forward with
his mind. Then the woes of miners and the world's burden-bearers
filled the ears of James Watt with torment, and his sympathetic heart
would not let him stay until he had fashioned his redemptive tool.
For generations, also, the thoughts of liberty waited for the heart to
re-enforce them and make them practical in institutions. Two thousand
years before the era of Cromwell and Hampden, Grecian philosophers
wrought out a full statement for the republic and individual liberty.
The right of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness were truths
clearly perceived by Plato and Pericles. But the heart loved luxury
and soft, silken refinements, and Grecian philosophers in their palaces
refused to let their slaves go.
Wide, indeed, the gulf separating our age of kindness from Cicero's age
of cruelty! The difference is almost wholly a difference of heart.
This age has oratory and wisdom, and so had Cicero's; this age has
poetry and art, and so had that; but our age has heart and sympathy,
and Cicero's had not. Caesar's mind was the mind of a scholar, but his
hands were red with the blood of a half-million men slain in unjust
wars. Augustus loved refinement, literature and music. He assembled
at his table the scholars of a nation, yet his culture did not forbid
the slaying of ten thousand gladiators at his various garden parties.
We admire Pliny's literary style. One evening Pliny returned home from
the funeral of the wife of a friend and sat down to write that friend a
note of gratitude for having so arranged the gladiatorial spectacle as
to make the funeral service pass off quite pleasantly. For that age of
intellect was also an age of blood; the era of art and luxury was also
an era of cruelty and crime. The intellect lent a shining luster to
the era of Augustus, but because it was intellect only it was gilt and
not gold. Had the heart re-enforced the intellect with sympathy and
justice the age of Augustus might have been an era golden, indeed, and
also perpetual.
In all ages also the intellect of the common people has discerned truth
and light that the will has refused to fulfill. Generations ago
society discovered the doctrine of industry and integrity, and yet
thousands of individuals still prefer to steal or beg or starve rather
than work. For centuries the work of moralists and public instructors
has not been so much the making known new truth as the inspiring men to
do a truth already known. As of old, so now, the word is nigh man,
even in his mouth, for enabling society to lift every social burden,
right every social wrong, turn each rookery into a house, make each
place wealth, make every home happiness, make every child a scholar, a
patriot and a Christian. In Solomon's day wisdom stood in the corner
of the streets but man would not regard, and the city perished. Should
the heart now join the intellect, man's feet would swiftly find these
paths that lead to prosperity and perfect peace.
History portrays many men of giant minds whose intellect could not
redeem them from aimlessness and obscurity. Not until some divine
enthusiasm descended upon the mind and baptized it with heroic action
did these men find themselves. To that young patrician, Saul,
journeying to Damascus, came the heavenly vision, and the new impulse
of the heart made his cold mind warm, lent wings to his slow feet, made
all his days powerful, made his soul the center of an immense activity.
This glowing heart of Paul explains for us the fact that he achieved
freedom of thought and speech, endured the stones with which he was
bruised, the stocks in which he was bound, the mobbings with which he
was mutilated; explains also his eloquence, known and unrecorded;
explains his faith and fortitude, his heroism in death. And not only
has the zeal of the heart made strong men stronger, turned weak men
into giants, lent the soldier his conquering courage and lent the
scholar a stainless life--to men whose will has been made weak by
indulgence, the new love has come to redeem intellect and will from the
bondage of habit.
No one who ever heard John B. Gough can forget his marvelous eloquence,
his wit and his pathos, his scintillating humor, his inimitable
dramatisms. He did not have the polished brilliancy of Everett or the
elegant scholarship of Phillips, and yet when these numbered thousands
of admirers, Gough numbered his tens of thousands. In his
autobiography this man tells us to what sad straits passion had brought
him; how he reflected upon the injury he was doing himself and others,
only to find that his reflections and resolutions snapped like cobwebs
before the onslaught of temptation. One night the young bookbinder
drifted into a little meeting and, buttoning his seedy overcoat to
conceal his rags, in some way he found himself upon his feet and began
to speak. The address that proved a pleasure to others was a
revelation to himself. For the first time Gough tasted the joys of
moving men and mastering them for good. Within a week that love of
public speech and useful service had kindled his mental faculties into
a creative glow. The new and higher love of the heart consumed the
lower love of the body, just as the sun melts manacles of ice from a
man's wrist.
Even in Shakespeare the springs of genius were not in the mind. The
heart of our greatest poet was so sensitive that he could not see an
apple blossom without hoping that no untimely frost would nip it; could
not see the clusters turn purple under the autumn sun without hoping
that hailstones would not pound off the rich clusters; could not see a
youth leave his home to seek his fortune without praying that he would
return to his mother laden with rich treasures; could not see a bride
go down the aisle of the church without sending up a petition that many
years might intervene before death's hand should touch her white brow.
Sympathy in the heart so fed the springs of thought in the mind that it
was easy for the poet to put himself in another's place. And so, while
his pen wrote, his heart felt itself to be the king and also his
servant, to be the merchant and also his clerk, to be the general and
also his soldier. He saw the assassin drawing near the throne with a
dagger beneath his cloak; he went forth with King Lear to shiver
beneath the wintry blasts; he rejoiced with Rosalind and wept with
Hamlet, and there was no joy or grief or woe or wrong that ever touched
a human heart that he did not perfectly feel and, therefore, perfectly
describe. For depth of mind begins with depth of heart. The greatest
writers are primarily seers and only incidentally thinkers. As of old,
so now, for a thousand thinkers there is only one great seer.
Having affirmed the influence of the heart upon the intellect and
scholarship, let us hasten to confess that the heart determines the
religious belief and creed. It is often said that belief is a matter
of pure reason determined wholly by evidence. And doubtless it is true
that in approaching mathematical proofs man is to discharge his mind of
all color. That two and two are four is true for the poet and the
miser, for the peaceable man not less than the litigious. But of the
other truths of life it is a fact that with the heart man believes. We
approach wheat with scales, we measure silk with a yardstick; we test
the painting with taste and imagination, and the symphony with the
sense of melody; motives and actions are tested by conscience; we
approach the stars with a telescope, while purity of heart is the glass
by which we see God. The scales that are useful in the laboratory are
utterly valueless in the art gallery. The scientific faculty that fits
Spencer for studying nature unfits him for studying art. In his old
age Huxley, the scientist, wrote an essay forty pages long to prove
that man was more beautiful than woman. Imagine some Tyndall
approaching the transfiguration of Raphael to scrape off the colors and
test them with acid and alkali for finding out the proportion of blue
and crimson and gold. These are the methods that would give the
village paint-grinder precedency above genius itself.
In 1837 two boys entered Faneuil hall and heard Wendell Phillips'
defense of Lovejoy. One youth was an English visitor who saw the
portraits of Otis and Hancock, yet saw them not; heard the words of
Phillips, yet heard them not, and because his heart was in London
believed not unto patriotism. But the blood of Adams was in the veins
of the other youth. He thought of Samuel Adams, who heard the firing
at Lexington and exclaimed; "What a glorious morning this is!" He
thought of John Adams and his love of liberty. He thought of the old
man eloquent, John Quincy Adams, in the Halls of Congress, and as he
listened to the burning words of the speaker, tears filled his eyes and
pride filled his soul. It was his native land. With his heart he
believed unto patriotism.
What the man is determines largely what his intellect thinks about God.
When the heart is narrow, harsh, and rigorous its theology is despotic
and cruel. When the heart grows kindly, sympathetic and of autumnal
richness, it emphasizes the sympathy and love of God. Each man paints
his own picture of God. The heart lends the pigments. Souls full of
sweetness and light fill the divine portrait with the lineaments of
love. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness.
Happy, indeed, our age, in that the heart is now beginning to color our
civilization. Vast, indeed, the influence of library and lecture-hall,
of gallery and store and market-place, but the most significant fact of
our day is that sympathy is baptizing our industries and institutions
with new effort. Intellect has lent the modern youth instruments many
and powerful. Inventive thought has lent fire to man's forge, tools
for his hands, books for his reading, has lent arts, sciences,
institutions. The modern youth stands forth in the aspect of the Roman
conqueror to whom the citizens went forth to bestow gifts, one taking
his chariot, one leading a steed, the children scattering flowers in
the way, young men and maidens taking the hero's name upon their lips.
Unfortunately multitudes have declined those high gifts, turning away
from the open door of the schoolhouse and college; many young feet have
crossed the threshold of the saloon. Having entered our museum or
art-gallery, multitudes enter places of evil resort.
The heart is also coloring industry. This year it is said that more
than a score of great industrial institutions in our country have, to
the factory, added gymnasium, recreation-hall, schoolroom, library,
free musicals and lectures. The intellect has failed to solve the
social problems by giving allopathic doses from Poor Richard's Almanac.
Impotent also those dreamers who have insisted that society must have
socialism--either God's or the devil's. Impotent those who, during the
past week, have proposed to cure economic ills by spitting the heads of
tyrants upon bayonets. But what force and law cannot do is slowly
being done by sympathy and good-will. The heart is taking the rigor
out of toil, the drudgery out of service, the cruelty out of laws,
harshness out of theology, injustice out of politics. Love has done
much. The social gains of the future are to be to the gradual progress
of sympathy and love.
Unto man who goes through life working, weeping, laughing, loving,
comes the heart believing unto immortality. For reason oft the
immortal hope burns low and the stars dim and disappear, but for the
heart, never! Scientists tell us matter is indestructible. And the
heart nourishes an immortal hope that no doubt can quench, no argument
destroy, no misfortune annihilate. Comforting, indeed, for reasons,
the arguments of Socrates that life survives death. After the death of
his beloved daughter Tullia, Cicero outlined arguments which have
consoled the mind of multitudes. But in the hour of darkness and
blackness, for a man to put out upon Death's dark sea, upon the
argument of Cicero, is like some Columbus committing himself to a
single plank in the hope of discovering an unseen continent.
In these dark hours the heart speaks. In the poet's vision, to blind
Homer, falling into the bog, torn by the thorns and thickets and lost
in the forest and the night, came the young goddess, the daughter of
Light and Beauty, to take the sightless poet by the hand and lead him
up the heavenly heights. Sometimes intellect seems sightless and
wanders lost in the maze. Then comes the heart to lead man along the
upward path. For even in its dreams the heart hears the sound of
invisible music. Oft before reason's eye the heart unveils the Vision
Splendid. The soul is big with immortality. When the heart speaks it
is God within making overtures for man to come upward toward home and
heaven.
"To live absolutely each man for himself could not be possible if all
were to live together. In course of time, in addition to utility,
certain more sensitive individuals began to see a charm, a beauty in
this consideration for others. Gradually a sort of sanctity attached
to it, and nature had once more illustrated her mysterious method of
evolving from rough and even savage necessities her lovely shapes and
her tender dreams. To assert, then, with some recent critics of
Christianity, that that law of brotherly love which is its central
teaching is impracticable of application to the needs of society, is
simply to deny the very first law by which society exists."--_Richard
Le Galliene, in "The Religion of a Literary Man._"
"Jesus said; 'Whosoever will come after Me, let him renounce himself,
and take up his cross daily and follow Me.' Perhaps there is no other
maxim of Jesus which has such a combined stress of evidence for it and
may be taken as so eminently His."--Matthew Arnold.
CHAPTER VIII.
Later on, when each of the two cells has grown again to the size of the
original one, the same peril threatens them and they too must divide or
die. And when through this law of saving life by losing it nature has
made sure the basis for bud and bird, for beast and man, then the
principle of sacrifice goes on to secure beauty of the individual plant
or animal and perpetuity for the species. In the center of each grain
of wheat there is a golden spot that gives a yellow cast to the fine
flour. That spot is called the germ. When the germ sprouts and begins
to increase, the white flour taken up as food begins to decrease. As
the plant waxes, the surrounding kernel wanes. The life of the higher
means the death of the lower. In the orchard also the flower must fall
that the fruit may swell. If the young apple grows large, it must
begin by pushing off the blossom. But by losing the lower bud, the
tree saves the higher fruit.
Sacrifice also is the secret of beauty. After a little time the life
of pleasure and selfishness will make the sweetest fact opaque and
repellent, while self-sacrificing thoughts are cosmetics that at last
make the plainest face to be beautiful. In the calm of scholarship men
have given up the thought that culture consists of an exquisite
refinement in manners and dress, in language and equipage. The poet
laureate makes Maud the type of polished perfection. She is "icily
regular, splendidly null," for culture is more of the heart than of the
mind. But as eloquence means that an orator has so mastered the laws
of posture, and gesture and thought and speech that they are utterly
forgotten, and have become second nature, so knowledge becomes culture,
and physical perfection becomes beauty, only when it is unconscious.
In the moral realm also, the gains for the soul begin with loss. In
the hour of temptation he who sacrifices the higher duty to the lower
pleasure will find that ease has shorn away the strength of Samson.
Victor Hugo has pictured a man committing suicide through poverty, and
deserting the duty and dwelling where God has placed him. But waking
in the next world, the man perceives a letter on the way to himself
announcing a large inheritance which would have been his had he but
been patient. Therefore the great novelist affirms that God makes such
a man begin over again, only under harder conditions, the existence
that here he has willfully shattered. What a tragedy is his who, to
save the present good, will lose the higher life. Whittier expressed
the fear that Daniel Webster saved his life only to lose it. In his
works the poet recalls the time when for genius of statesmanship and
weight of mentality Webster's like was not upon our earth. But in an
evil hour the statesman saw that the presidency was a prize that could
be gained by giving the fugitive slave law as a sop to the South. In
that hour his character suffered grievous injury. In the attempt to
save men's votes he lost men's higher respect. In deepest sorrow his
admirers, abroad and at home, cried out: "O, Lucifer, thou son of the
morning, how art thou fallen!"
But avarice could not forever blind men's eyes to scenes of sorrow, nor
stop their ears to sounds of woe. When the horrors of the slave-market
and the infamies of the cotton-field filled all the land with shame
reformers arose, declaring that the attempt to compress and confine
liberty would end in explosion. In that hour Northern men made
tentative overtures looking to the purchase of all slaves. But
slavery, Delilah-like, made the southern leaders drunk with the cup of
sorcery. They scorned the proposition. In the light of subsequent
events we see that in saving her institution the South lost it, and
with it her wealth, while in losing her slaves the North gained her
wealth. Under free labor the North doubled its population, its
manufactories, its riches and waxed mighty. Under slave-labor the
South dwindled in wealth and became only the empty shell of a state.
The spark fired at Fort Sumter kindled a conflagration that swept
through the sunny South like a devastating fire and revealed its inner
poverty. When four years had passed by the farmhouses and factories
were ruins, the village was a heap, the town a desolation. Graveyards
were as populous as cities, each village had its company of cripples,
the cry of the orphan and the widow filled all the land.
When Charles Darwin returned from his voyage around the world, he sent
a generous contribution to the London Missionary Society. The great
scientist had discovered that in lessening her wealth through missions
England had saved her treasure through commerce. Traveling in foreign
lands, Darwin noticed that the Christian teachers in schools that now
touch 3,000,000 of young men and women in India, were really commercial
agents for England's trade. In awakening the minds of the darkened
millions the teacher had created a demand for books, newspapers and
printing-presses. In awakening the sense of self-respect the teacher
had created a demand for English clothing and the product of English
looms. Also the influence of each home, with its comforts and
conveniences, created a demand for English tools and improvements of
labor. Summing up his observation, Lord Havelock said that each
thousand dollars England had spent upon her missions had brought a
return of a hundred thousand dollars through her commerce. Hitherto
the interior of China has been closed to English merchants. To that
dark land, therefore, England has sent 200 teachers whose homes are
centers of light and inspiration. When two-score years have passed
English fleets will be taxed to the utmost to carry to China, as now to
India, her fabrics of cotton and wool, her presses, looms,
sewing-machines, her pictures, her libraries. In giving of her wealth
to found these destitute schools England will save it a hundred-fold
and find new markets among 300,000,000 people.
Sacrifice is also the secret of influence. Long ago Cicero noted that
tales of heroes and eloquence and self-sacrifice cast a charm and spell
upon the people. When men sacrifice ease, wealth, rank, life itself,
the delight of the beholders knows no bounds. If we call the roll of
the sons of greatness and influence we shall see that they are also the
sons of self-sacrifice. The Grecian hero who lost his life that he
might save his influence is typical of all the great leaders. Phocion
was a patriot and martyr whose single error in judgment brought down a
catastrophe upon his beloved Athens. When the fierce mob surrounded
his house and prepared to beat down his doors, friends offered Phocion
escape and shelter, but the hero went calmly forth to meet his death.
When the day of execution arrived the cup of poison was handed to the
other leaders first. The jailer was careful to see to it that before
he reached Phocion he had only a few drops of hemlock left in his cup,
but the hero drew out his purse and bade a youth run swiftly to buy
more poison, saying to the onlookers: "Athens makes her patriots pay,
even for dying." Losing his life, Phocion, found immortal influence.
CHAPTER IX.
History has never known another such an enthusiasm for a hero as the
multitude once felt toward Jesus Christ. There have indeed been times
when such patriots as Garibaldi, Kossuth and Lincoln have kindled in
men an enthusiasm akin to adoration and worship. Yet let us hasten to
confess that the qualities calculated to quicken men into raptures of
devotion appeared in these patriots only in fragmentary form, while
they dwelt in Christ in full-orbed majesty and splendor. The welcome
Chicago gave to Grant upon his return from his journey around the
world; the enthusiasm excited by Kossuth when in 1851 he drove through
Broadway, New York; the wave of gratitude that swept over the Italian
multitude when Garibaldi appeared in Florence--all these are events
that bear witness to society's devotion to its patriots and heroes.
But, be it remembered, these scenes occurred but once in the history of
each of these great men.
Purity in others has been cold and chaste as ice. How strange that in
Him purity had an irresistible fascination, so that the corruptest and
wickedest felt drawn unto Him, and "depravity itself bowed down and
wept in the presence of divinity." What all-forgiving love, what
all-cleansing love, in one who by a mere look could dissolve in
repentant tears men long hardened by vice and crime! What an
atmosphere of power He must have carried, that by one beam from His eye
He could smite to the very ground the soldiers who confronted Him!
Did ever man have such a genius for noble friendship? What bosom words
He used! What love pressure in all His speech! How were His words
laden with double meanings, so that hearing one thing, men also heard
another, even as they who hear the sound of the distant sea, knowing
that the sound they hear is but a breath of the great infinite ocean
that heaves beyond in the dim, vast dark. Among all the heroes of time
He walks solitary by the greatness of His power, His beauty and the
wonder of love His personality excited. Standing in the presence of
some glorious cathedral or gallery, beholding the Parthenon or
pyramids, the rugged mountain or the beautiful landscape, emotion and
imagination are sometimes so deeply stirred that men lose command of
themselves and break into transports of admiration. But the enthusiasm
evoked by mountain or statue or canvas is as nothing compared to the
rapturous devotion felt by the multitude for this One, who united in
full splendor all those eminent qualities of mind and heart that all
the ages and generations have in vain sought to emulate. High over all
the other worthies He rises like a star riding in untroubled splendor
above the low-browed hills.
In all ages great men have educated themselves by reading the biography
of ancient worthies, and emulating the example of the heroes of
antiquity. Great has been the influence of these reformers and
philosophers, statesmen and poets, hanging in the heavens above men and
raining down inspiration upon the human imagination. Yet from all the
worthies of the past, and all modern heroes, man has drawn less of
inspiration and personal influence than from the single example of this
ideal Christ. Passing by His influence upon institutions, education,
art and literature, we shall do well to consider how His example has
instructed man in the art of a right carriage of the faculties in the
home and market-place. In the last analysis, Jesus Christ is the only
perfect gentleman our earth has ever known--in comparison with whom all
the Chesterfields seem boors. For nothing taxes a man so heavily as
the task of maintaining smooth, pleasant and charitable relations with
one's fellows. And Christ alone was able always to meet storm with
calm, hate with love, scowls with smiles, plottings with confidence,
envy and bitterness with unruffled tranquility.
In all His relations with His friends and enemies the quality that
crowns His method of living and challenges our thought is the
gentleness of His bearing. Matchless the mingled strength and beauty
of His life, yet gentleness was the flower and fruitage of it all. For
in Him the lion and the lamb dwelt together. Oak and rock were there,
and also vine and flower. Weakness is always rough. Only giants can
be gentle. Tenderness is an inflection of strength. No error can be
greater than to suppose that gentleness is mere absence of vigor.
Weakness totters and tugs at its burden. When the dwarf that attended
Ivanhoe at the tournament lifted the bleeding sufferer he staggered
under his heavy burden. Weakness made him stumble and caused the
wounded knight intense pain. When the giant of the brawny arm and the
unconquered heart came, he lifted the unconscious sufferer like a
feather's weight and without a jar bore him away to a secure
hiding-place for healing and recovering. He who studies the great men
of yesterday will find in the last analysis that gentleness has always
been the test of gianthood, and fine considerateness the measure of
manhood and the gauge of personal worth. No other hero moving through
the crowds has ever been so courteously gentle, so sweetly considerate
in his personal bearing as this Christ--who never failed to kindle in
men transports of delight and enthusiasm.
The crying fault of our generation is its lack of gentleness. Our age
is harsh when it judges, brutal when it blames and savage in its
severity. Carlyle, emptying vials of scorn upon the people of England,
numbering his generation by "thirty millions, mostly fools," is typical
of the publicists, authors and critics who pelt their brother man with
contemptuous scorn. The author of "Robert Elsmere" exhibits that
polished scholar and brilliant student as one who gave up teaching
because he could find no audience on a level with his ability or worthy
of his instruction. Having begun by despising others, he ends by
despising himself. Now the popularity of Elsmere's character witnesses
to the fact that our generation includes a large number of cynics who
scorn their fellows and in Elsmere see themselves as "in an open
glass." To-day this tendency toward harshness of judgment has become
more pronounced, and there seems to be no leader so noble as to escape
brutal criticism and no movement whose white flag may not be smirched
by mud-slingers. What epithets are hurled at each new idea! What
torrents of ridicule are emptied out upon each social movement!
The fact that society has oftentimes destroyed its noblest geniuses
avails little for the restraint of harshness. For years England was
wildly merry at Turner's expense. The newspapers cartooned his
paintings. Reviews spoke of them as "color blotches." The rich over
their champagne made merry at the great artist's expense. After a
while men found a little respite from the mad chase for wealth and
pleasure and discovered that Turner's extreme examples represented
peculiar moods in nature, seen only by those who had traveled as widely
as had Turner, while his great landscapes were as rich in imaginative
quality as those of any artist of all ages. Only when it was too late,
only when harshness had broken the man's heart, and scorn had fatally
wounded his genius, did scholars begin to adorn their pages by
references to Turner's fame, did the rich begin to pay fabulous sums
for the very pictures they had once despised, the nation set apart the
best room in its gallery for Turner's works, while the people wove for
his white tombstone wreaths they had denied his brow and paid his dead
ashes honors refused his living spirit.
Witness also the contempt our age once visited upon Browning, whose
mind is slowly becoming recognized as one of the rich-gold minds of our
century. Witness the sport over Ruskin's "Munera Pulveris," and the
scornful reception given Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus." Now that a few
years have passed, those who once reviled are teaching their children
the pathway to the graves of the great. The harshness of the world's
treatment of its greatest teachers makes one of the most pathetic
chapters in history. God gives each nation only a few men of supreme
talent. Gives it, for greatness is not made; it is found as is the
gold. Gold cannot be made out of mud; it is uncovered. And God gives
each generation a few men of the first order; and when they have
created truth and beauty they have the right while they live to
kindness and sympathy, not harshness and cynicism. No youth winning
the first goal of his ambition was ever injured by knowing that his
father's face did not flush with pride, while his mother's eyes were
filled with happy tears, in joy of his first victory. No noble lover
but girds himself for a second struggle the more resolutely for knowing
that his noble mistress rejoiced in his first conquest. Frost itself
is not more destructive to harvest fields than harshness is to the
creative faculties. Strange that Florence gave Dante exile in exchange
for his immortal poem! Strange that London gave Milton threats of
imprisonment for the manuscript of "Paradise Lost!" Passing strange
that until his career was nearly run universities visited upon John
Ruskin only scorn and contumely, that ruined his health and broke his
heart, withholding the wreath until, as he said pathetically, his only
"pleasure was in memory, his ambition in heaven," and he knew not what
to do with his laurel leaves save "lay them wistfully upon his mother's
grave." In every age the critics that have refused honor to its
worthies, living, have heaped gifts high upon the graves of its dead.
Early Carlyle wooed and won one of the most brilliant girls of his day,
whose signal talent shone in the crowded drawing-rooms of London like a
sapphire blazing among pebbles. Yet her husband lacked gentleness.
Slowly harshness crept into Carlyle's voice. Soon the wife gave up her
favorite authors to read the husband's notes; then she gave up all
reading to relieve him of details; at last her very being was placed on
the altar of sacrifice--fuel to feed the flame of his fame and genius.
Long before the end came she was submerged and almost forgotten. One
day two distinguished foreign authors called upon Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle.
For an hour the philosopher poured forth vehement tirade against the
commercial spirit, while the good wife never once opened her lips. At
last the author ceased talking, and there was silence for a time.
Suddenly Carlyle thundered: "Jane, stop breathing so loud!" Long years
before Jane had stopped doing everything else except breathe. And so,
obedient to the injunction, a few days afterward she ceased "breathing
so loud."
When a few weeks had gone by Carlyle discovered, through reading her
journal, that his wife had for want of affection frozen and starved to
death within his home like some poor traveler who had fallen in the
snows beyond the door. For years, without his realizing it, she had
kept all the wheels oiled, kept his body in health and his mind in
happiness. Only when it was too late did the husband realize that his
fame was largely his wife's. Then did the old man begin his pathetic
pilgrimage to his wife's grave, where Froude often found him murmuring:
"If I had only known! If I had only known!" For all his supreme gifts
and rare talents were marred by harshness. Intellectual brilliancy
weighs light as punk against the gold of gentleness and character.
Half Carlyle's books, weighted by a gentle, noble spirit, would have
availed more for social progress than these many volumes with the bad
taste they leave in the mouth. The sign of ripeness in an apple, a
peach, is beauty, and the test of character is gentleness and kindness
of heart.
Several years ago an industrial war was waged in the coal districts of
England that cost that nation untold treasure. It is said that the
strife grew out of harsh words between the leaders of the opposing
factions. It seemed that the industrious and worthy poor men
overlooked the fact that there were industrious and worthy rich men and
insisted on speaking only of the idle and spendthrift rich. Then
followed his opponent who, as an industrious and worthy rich man,
insisted on ignoring the industrious and worthy poor, but spoke only of
the idle and thriftless poor, the paupers and parasites. Soon
gentleness was forgotten and harshness remembered. Soon there came the
trampled cornfields and the bloody streets.
Teachers also need to learn the lesson of Arnold of Rugby. One day the
great instructor spake harshly to a dull boy, who an hour afterward
came to him with tearful eyes, and in a half-sobbing voice exclaimed;
"But why are you angry, sir? I am doing my best." Then Arnold learned
that a lesson easy for one mind may be a torture for another. So he
begged the boy's pardon, and recognized the principle of gentleness
that afterward made him the greatest instructor of his time.
Not war, not pestilence, not famine itself, produces for each
generation so much misery and unhappiness as is wrought in the
aggregate through the accumulated harshness of each generation.
Blessed are the happiness-makers! Blessed are they who with humble
talents make themselves like the mignonette, creators of fragrance and
peace! Thrice blessed are they who with lofty talents emulate the
vines that climbing high never forget to blossom, and the higher they
climb do ever shed sweet blooms upon those beneath! No single great
deed is comparable for a moment to the multitude of little gentlenesses
performed by those who scatter happiness on every side and strew all
life with hope and good cheer.
Life holds no motive for stimulating gentleness in man like the thought
of the gentleness of God. Unfortunately, it seems difficult for man to
associate delicacy and gentleness with vastness and strength. It was
the misfortune of Greek philosophers and is, indeed, that of nearly all
the modern theologians, to suppose that a perfect being cannot suffer.
Both schools of thought conceive of God as sitting upon a marble
throne, eternally young, eternally beautiful, beholding with quiet
indifference from afar how man, with infinite blunderings, sufferings
and tears makes his way forward. Yet He who holds the sun in the
hollow of his hand, who takes up the isles as a very little thing, who
counts the nations but as the dust in the balance, is also the gentle
One. Like the wide, deep ocean, that pulsates into every bay and creek
and blesses the distant isles with its dew and rain, so God's heart
throbs and pulsates unto the uttermost parts of the universe, having a
parent's sympathy for His children who suffer.
Indeed, the seer ranges through all nature searching out images for
interpreting His all-comprehending gentleness. "Even the bruised reed
he will not break." Lifting itself high in the air, a mere lead pencil
for size, weighted with a heavy top, a very little injury shatters a
reed. Some rude beast, in wild pursuit of prey, plunges through the
swamp, shatters the reed, leaves it lying upon the ground, all bruised
and bleeding, and ready to die. Such is God's gentleness that, though
man make himself as worthless as a bruised reed; though by his
ignorance, frailty and sin he expel all the manhood from his heart and
life, and make himself of no more value than one of the myriad reeds in
the world's swamps, still doth God say: "My gentleness is such that I
will direct upon this wounded life thoughts that shall recuperate and
heal, until at last the bruised reed shall rise up in strength, and
judgment shall issue in victory."
And as God's gentleness would go one step further, there is added the
tender lesson of the smoking flax. Our glowing electric bulbs suffer
no injury from blasts, and our lamps have like strength. The time was,
when, wakened by the cry of the little sufferer, the ancient mother
sprang up to strike the tinder and light the wick in the cup of oil.
Only with difficulty was the tinder kindled. Then how precious the
spark that one breath of air would put out! With what eagerness did
the mother guard the smoking flax! And in setting forth the gentleness
of God it is declared that, with eyes of love, He searches through each
heart, and if He find so much as a spark of good in the outcast, the
publican, the sinner, He will tend that spark and feed it toward the
love that shall glow and sparkle forever and ever; for evil is to be
conquered, and God will not so much punish as exterminate sin from His
universe. His strength is inflicted toward gentleness, His justice
tempered with mercy, and all his attributes held in solution of love.
No longer should medievalism becloud God's gentle face. Cleanse your
thoughts, as once the artist in Milan cleansed the grime and soot from
the wall where Dante's lustrous face was hidden.
With shouts and transports of joy and admiration men welcome the
patriot or hero who in times of danger held the destiny of the people
in his hands and never once betrayed it. And let each intellect soar
without hindrance, and the heart pour itself out before God in a
freshet of divine love. Great is the genius of Plato or Bacon,
revealing itself in tides of thought, but greater and richer is the
genius of the heart that is conscious of vast, deep fountains of love,
that may be poured forth in generous tides before the God whose throne
is mercy, whose face is light, whose name is love, whose strength is
gentleness, whose considerateness is our pledge of pardon, peace and
immortality.
THE THUNDER OF SILENT FIDELITY:
"We treat God with irreverence by banishing Him from our thoughts, not
by referring to His will on slight occasions. His is not the finite
authority or intelligence which cannot be troubled with small things.
There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His
guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands; and what
is true of Deity is equally true of His Revelation. We use it most
reverently when most habitually; our insolence is in ever acting
without reference to it, our true honoring of it is in its universal
application. I have been blamed for the familiar introduction of its
sacred words. I am grieved to have given pain by so doing, but my
excuse must be my wish that those words were made the ground of every
argument and the test of every action. We have them not often enough
on our lips, nor deeply enough in our memories, nor loyally enough in
our lives. The snow, the vapour and the strong wind fulfil His word.
Are our acts and thoughts lighter and wilder than these, that we should
forget it?"--_Ruskin_.
"I expect to pass through this life but once. If there is any kindness
or any good thing I can do to my fellow-beings let me do it now. I
shall pass this way but once."---_William Penn_.
CHAPTER X.
We see the public square crowded with merchants and traders, who have
come in from the great cities of the world to this festival of the
fathers. With solemn pageantry, these Jews, who were the bankers and
merchants of that far-off age, march through the streets toward the
gate that is called Beautiful. In the vast parade are men notable by
their princely wealth in Ephesus and Antioch, in Alexandria and Rome.
We see one advancing with his retinue of servants, another with the
train which corresponds to his wealth. One group the artist exhibits
as characteristic. Advancing before their lord and master are four
servants, who lift up in the presence of admiring spectators a platter
upon which lies a heap of shining gold. The murmur of admiration that
runs through the crowd is sweeter to the old merchant's ear than any
music of harp or human voice. Passing by the treasury, what gifts are
cast upon the resounding table! How heavy the bars of gold! What
silver plate! What pearls and jewels! How rich the fabrics and
hangings for the temple! As at St. Peter in the sixteenth century, so
in Christ's day it seemed as if the whole world were being swept for
treasures for enriching this glorious temple.
But when the lions of the procession had all passed by, there followed
also the crowd of stragglers. From this post of observation we are
told that Christ saw a poor widow advancing. With falling tears, yet
with exquisite grace and tenderness, she cast in two mites, or one
half-penny, then passed on to worship him whom she loved, all
unconscious of the fact that she had also passed into immortality. For
the noise of the gold falling into the resounding chest has long since
died away. Jerusalem itself is in ruins. The old temple with its
magnificence has gone to decay. The proud thrones and monarchies have
all fallen into dust. But the silent fidelity of this obscure woman is
a voice that thunders down the long aisles of time. A thousand times
hath she encouraged heroism in poet and parent. Ten thousand times
hath she been an inspiration to reformers and martyrs! Love and
fidelity have embalmed her deed and lent her immortality. In the very
center of the world's civilization stands her monument. For her Arc de
Triomphe has been built in the human heart. Her monument does not
appeal to the eye; it is not carved in stone; yet it is more permanent
than gold, and her fame outshines all flashing jewels. While love and
admiration endure the story of her humble fidelity shall abide
indestructible!
The great Italian first noted that thrice only did Christ stretch forth
his hand to build a monument, and each time it was to immortalize a
deed of humble fidelity. Once a disciple gave a cup of cold water to
one of God's little ones, and won thereby imperishable renown. Once a
woman broke an alabaster box for her master, and, lo! her deed has been
like a broken vase, whose perfume has exhaled for two thousand years,
and shall go on diffusing sweetness to the end of time. Last of all,
after the rich men of Alexandria had cast their rattling gold into the
brazen treasury, a poor widow cast a speck of dust called two mites,
and, lo! this humble deed gave her enduring recollection.
For no palace was ever so beautiful, no royal wine quaffed from vessels
of gold was ever so sweet as to satisfy hearts famishing for one mite
of that heavenly manna love prepares, or one cup filled with kindness.
If ages ago the sages said, God is not in the earthquake, nor in the
storm, but in the still small voice, now science reaffirms the
declaration that omnipotence is revealed not so much through awful
cataclysms and earthquake forces as through the silent agents and
hidden processes that make the plains to be fruitful and hillsides to
be rich in corn. In the past astronomy has been the favorite science,
emphasizing the distant stars and suns. The science of the future is
to be chemistry, emphasizing atoms and elements. Journeying outward in
pursuit of the footsteps of God, advancing upon his distant and dizzy
march, man's vision faints and falls upon the horizon beyond which are
indiscernible splendors. Journeying inward upon the wings of the
microscope, we shall find that there is another realm of beauty beyond
which the utmost vision of man cannot pierce. For before the
microscope "the last discernible particle dies out of sight with the
same perfect glory on it as on the last orb that glimmers in the skirts
of the universe." If God is throned in the clouds He is also
tabernacled in the dewdrop and palaced in the bud and blossom.
The enemies of human life are not enemies that fill man's streets with
banners and charging cannon. We wage war against the dust mote
ambushed in the sunbeam; we fight against weapons hurled from those
battleships called drops of impure water; we wrestle with those hosts
whose broadsides invisible rise from streets foul, or fall from
poisoned clouds. Such enemies that lurk in dampness and darkness, a
thousand fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand. That
great catastrophe that overtook Holland a century ago is not explained
by a tidal wave that pierced through the dikes; the disaster was
through the crawfishes that opened tiny holes and, weakening the
bulwarks, let in the onrushing sea.
It was but a trifling error also that robbed the generations of one of
man's divinest pictures. Three hundred years ago the monks made tight
and strong the roof above the room where was Da Vinci's "Last Supper."
A thousand tiles were fastened down and all save one were perfect. The
one hid a secret hole. When months had passed and the driving storm
came from the right direction the rain found out that hidden fault and,
rushing in, a flood of drops streamed down o'er the wall and made a
great black mark across the noble painting, and ruined the central face
forever.
Human life is ruined through the absence of humble virtues and the
presence of little faults. There is no man so great, no gift so
brilliant, but let it be whispered that there is falseness in the life
of the hero, and immediately his greatness is dwarfed, his eloquence
becomes a trick, his authority is impaired. Reading Robert Burns'
poems, he seems wiser than all the scholars, wittier than all the
humorists, more courtly than princes. His genius blazes like a torch
among the tapers. But watching this son of genius and of liberty weave
a net for his own feet, and fashion a snare for his own faculties, with
wistful hearts we long, as one has said, "to hear the exulting and
triumphant cry of the strong man coming to himself, I will arise." But
he loved the barroom more than the library, and so fell on death at
seven and thirty, and lost his right to rule as a king o'er men's
hearts and lives. Byron, too, and Goethe had gifts so resplendent that
in kings' palaces they shine like diamonds amid the pebbles. What a
constellation of gifts was theirs! Culture, sanity, imagination, wit,
courage, vigor--all these stars were grouped in their mental
constellations! Yet little vices dethroned these kings and made them
plebeian. It is the absence of little virtues and sweet domestic
graces that seem trifling as the two mites that robs the Roman poets
and orators of their power over us. They had urbanites indeed,
flowers, music, art, oratory, letters, song. The events of each day
were executed like a piece of music, and even their sarcophagi were
covered with scenes of feasting and revelry. But they were not true;
and that false note jars through all their pages. Harshness in the
poet and pride in the orator make their refinement and culture seem but
skin deep.
In one of his essays Lowell notes that the great reform monuments are
the humble deeds of humble persons, taken up and repeated by an entire
people. The final victories for liberty and religion are emblazoned
upon monuments and celebrated in song and story, but the beginnings of
these achievements for mankind are often given over to obscurity and
forgetfulness. Our age makes much of the "Red Cross" movement. Hardly
fifty years have passed since two English girls boarded the steamer
that was to carry them to the Crimea. Upon the distant battlefields,
with their deserted cannon, wounded horses and dying men, at first
these gentle girls seemed strangely out of place. The hospitals were
full; neglected soldiers were lying in the thickets, whither they had
crawled to die. Counseling with none, these brave girls moved across
the battlefields like angels of mercy. Many years have passed. Now
these nurses bring hope to every battlefield, and minister to every
stricken Armenia, for the story of that sweet girl has filled the earth
with "King's Daughters." One hundred years ago also England left her
orphan babes to grow up in the country poorhouse, midst surroundings
often vulgar, profane and brutal. One day two sweet babes, unnamed and
unwelcomed, lay in the garret of a county-house in the outskirts of
London. Then a poor, half-witted spinster, hearing of the young
mother's death, found her way to the garret, brooded o'er the babes
with all the dignity of our Mother of Sorrows, took the babes to her
heart and planned how, with six shillings a week, she might keep bread
in three hungry mouths. Four years passed by, and one day the lord of
the manor stayed a moment before this woman's hovel and heard her
prayer for the two boys clinging to her skirts. Soon the story of the
woman's mercy was heard in every English pulpit, and in every town men
and women made their way to the county-houses to take away the orphan
babes and found instead some asylum for God's little ones. Now noble
men in distant lands plan homes and shelter for little children, and
the work of the obscure woman is a part of the history of reform.
Humble also is the origin of the anti-slavery movement that won its
final victory at Appomattox. A century and more ago a young Moravian
made his way to Jamaica as a Herald of Christ and his message of
good-will. The horrors of slavery in that far-off time cannot be
understood by our age. Then each week some African slaver landed with
its cargo of naked creatures. Slaves were so cheap that it was simpler
to kill them with rapid work and purchase new ones than to care for the
wants of captives weakened by several summers. What horrors under
overseers in the field! What outrages in slave-market and pen! So
grievous were the wrongs negroes suffered at white men's hands that
they would not listen to this young teacher. At last, despairing of
their confidence, the brave youth had himself sold as a slave and
wrought in the fields under the overseer's lash. Fellowship with their
sufferings won their confidence and love. When the day's task was done
the poor creatures crowded about him to receive Christ's cup of cold
water. Long years after the young hero had fallen upon the sugar
plantation his story came to the ears of young Wilberforce and armed
him with courage invincible against England's traffic in flesh and
blood. Soon Parliament freed the West India slaves and Lincoln
emancipated our freedmen. But side by side with the heroes of liberty
famed through monument and solemn oration, let us mention the young
Moravian hero who loved Christ's little ones, and in giving "two mites
and a cup of cold water," lost his life, indeed, but found immortal
fame.
This modest deed that bought renown also tells us that enduring
remembrance is possible for all. Great deeds the majority cannot do.
Two-talent men march in millions, but the ten-talent men are few and
far between. Many scientists--one Newton. Thousands of poets--but the
Elizabethan eras are separated by centuries. Great is the company of
the orators--but to each generation only one Webster and one Clay. As
each continent hath but one mountain range, so the elect minds stand
isolated in the ages. All greatness is mysterious, and like God's
throne, genius is girt about with clouds and darkness. If great men
are infrequent, the world's need of great men is as occasional.
Society advances in happiness and culture, not through striking,
dramatic acts, but through myriads of unnumbered and unnoticed deeds.
Even the heroes dying upon the battlefield ask not for Plato nor Bacon,
but for a cup of cold water. To Benedict Arnold, dying in his garret,
came a physician, who said, "Is there anything you wish?" and heard
this answer; "Only a friend." Traitors sometimes each of us also.
Traitors to our deepest convictions and our highest ideals, and in the
hours when the fever of discontent burns fiercely within us, and the
mind seems half-delirious in its trouble, we also ask for a friend
bringing a mite of sympathy and a cup of cold water. Let us confess
it--we are all famishing for love and the kind word that says: "In
your Gethsemane you are not alone."
God secures for us our happiness, not through speech about the heavens
and firmament, but through the comfort that comes through speech over
little things. He feeds the birds, adorns the lily, clothes the grass,
numbers man's troubles. He is the Shepherd seeking the one sheep, the
father waiting for the lost son. His kingdom is a little leaven
working in the world's meal, His truth being no larger than a grain of
mustard-seed. Above each little one bows some guardian angel beholding
the face of its heavenly Father. And He who unites grains of sand for
making planets and rays of light for glorious suns, and blades of grass
for the solid splendor of field and pasture and drops of water for the
ocean that blesses every continent with its dew and rain, teaches us
also that great principles will organize the little words, little
prayers, little aspirations and little services into the full-orbed
splendor of an enduring character and an immortal fame.
Happily none need journey far nor search long for opportunities of
humble fidelity. Into our midst come each year thousands of boys who
are strangers in the great city. Passing along the streets these
lonely lads behold each horse having some friendly hand to care for it.
Yea! each sleek dog hath some owner's name engraven on the collar for
the neck. But for the youth, weeks pass by, and no face lifts a
friendly smile, no hand is outstretched in gentle kindness, and oft the
thought is bitter: "No man careth for my soul." The youth who sits in
the seat beside you asks only that the leaflet be shared in
brotherliness, and you may lift upon the discouraged one a smile that
saith; "Once the battle went sore with me, also, but be of good cheer,
you shall overcome." Such friendliness is the two mites that buy
enduring rembrance. For if each must fight his own battles, face for
himself the spectres of doubt, and slay them; if each must be his own
surgeon and draw the iron from the soul, still sympathy is a precious
boon, and it is given to man to give the cup of tenderness to the
warrior sorely wounded in life's battle. In ancient times when men's
cabins were built on the edge of the wilderness, not yet cleared of
wild beasts, sometimes the little ones wandered from the path and were
lost in the forest, until the cry of terror revealed the awful danger
that threatened and caused the mother to speed forth with winged feet
and lift her body as a shield against the enemy. Daily these scenes
are re-enacted, not in songs and dramas, but through the work of those
who rescue the city's children from squalor, filth and sin. What
redemptions' man's little deeds do bring!
For $30,000 Peter Faneuil bought immortality and forever associated his
name with liberty. To-day that amount will erect the social settlement
in the needy quarter of some city and give hundreds of young people
opportunity and field for Bible-schools, kindergartens, nursery,
gymnasium, mothers' classes, men's clubs, singing-schools and also
associate man's name with the happiness and civilization of an entire
community. Mammon will care for the children of strength and good
fortune, and fame will guard the sons of success; let us guard the weak
and lowly. In the Roman triumph, when a general came home with his
spoils, many captives went with his chariot up to the capital. And
happy 'twill be for us if in the hour when the sunset gun shall sound
and we pass beyond the flood God's little ones mourn us with tears of
gratitude while all the trumpets sound for us on the other side.
[1] Ruskin's Modern Painters, Vol. iv., page 284. [Transcriber's note:
In the original book, there was no footnote symbol in the page where
this footnote appeared. I've made a best guess of its intended
location.]
"And now, gentlemen, was this vast campaign fought without a general?
If Trafalgar could not be won without the mind of a Nelson, or Waterloo
without the mind of a Wellington, was there no one mind to lead these
innumerable armies, on whose success depended the future of the whole
human race? Did no one marshal them in that impregnable convex front,
from the Euxine to the North Sea? No one guide them to the two great
strategic centres of the Black Forest and Trieste? No one cause them,
blind barbarians without maps or science, to follow those rules of war
without which victory in a protracted struggle is impossible: and by
the pressure of the Huns behind, force on their flagging myriads to an
enterprise which their simplicity fancied at first beyond the powers of
mortal men? Believe it who will; I cannot.
CHAPTER XI.
Then, straining more tightly the cords knotted around the prisoner's
hands and feet, the officer turned and plunged again into the thick of
the fight. From that moment the soldier's one duty was to guard the
prisoner whose escape would work such havoc.
A concealed knife had cut the thongs. Negligence had let "slip the
dogs of war." That night when the general returned to his tent he
found the prisoner had escaped.
This brief plastic moment is the inventor's opportunity, when the metal
will take on any shape for use or beauty. Similarly the fields offer a
strategic time to the husbandman. In February the soil refuses the
plow, the sun refuses heat, the sky refuses rain, the seed refuses
growth. In May comes an opportune time when all forces conspire toward
harvests; then the sun lends warmth, the clouds lend rain, the air
lends ardor, the soil lends juices. Then must the sower go forth and
sow, for nature whispers that if he neglects June he will starve in
January.
The planets also lend interpretation to this principle. Years ago our
nation sent astronomers to Africa to witness the transit of Venus.
Preparations began months beforehand. A ship was fitted up,
instruments packed, the ocean crossed, a site selected and the
telescopes mounted. Scientists made all things ready for that
opportune time when the sun and Venus and earth should all be in line.
That critical moment was very brief. Instinctively each astronomer
knew that his eye must be at the small end of the glass when the planet
went scudding by the large end. Once the period of conjunction had
passed no machinery would offer itself for turning the planet back upon
her axis. Not for astronomers only are the opportune times brief. For
all men alike, failure is blindness to the strategic element in events;
success is readiness for instant action when the opportune moment
arrives. When nature has fully ripened an opportunity man must stretch
out his hand and pluck it. Inventions may be defined as great minds
detecting the strategic moment in nature; Galileo finding a lens in the
ox's eye; Watt witnessing steam lift an iron lid; Columbus observing an
unknown wood drifting upon the shore. To untold multitudes nature
offered these opportune moments for discovery, but only Galileo, Watt
and Columbus were ready to seize them. As for the rest, this is our
only answer to nature: "While thy servant was busy here and there, the
strategic moment was gone."
How strategic that epoch called the fourth century! He who sat in
Caesar's palace looked out upon a dying empire. The old race was worn
out with war and wine and wealth and luxury. Civilization seemed about
to perish, and society was fast sinking back into barbarism. To the
north of the Alps were the forest children, ruddy and robust, with
their glorious youth full upon them. These young giants needed the
dying language and literature and religion, and these great
institutions needed their young, fresh blood. But between lay the
granite walls builded from sea to sea. Now mark what Charles Kingsley
called "the strategy of Providence." Suddenly a blind impulse fell
upon the forest children. Two columns started southward. The one
rested upon the North Sea and marched southeast; the other rested upon
the Ural Mountains and marched southwest; the two met and converged
upon Trieste. Without maps or military tactics or plans, wholly
ignorant that Napoleon's favorite method of attack was being carried
out by them, these two columns converged toward the Alpine pass, and
for ten years pounded and pounded against the Roman walls until these
yielded and fell. Then the forest children poured down into the
vineyards and villages and cities of the dying empire. Multitudes
remained to intermarry and preserve the dying race. Other multitudes
returned to their old home to sow the northern forests with those great
ideas that were to carry civilization through the long night of the
dark ages.
Another strategic hour came in the thirteenth century. Then all Europe
was stirred with new and awakening life. It was dawn after darkness.
Constantinople had fallen and scholars laden with manuscripts went
forth to sow Europe with the new learning. The times were fully ripe
for another great forward movement for society. Only one thing was
lacking--great men for leaders. In that strategic crisis six leaders
appeared. God gave each wing of the army of civilization a genius for
its general. Copernicus overthrew superstition and brought in science;
Luther gave religion, Gutenberg the printing-press, Calvin
individualism, Michael Angelo art and the beautiful, Erasmus critical
scholarship; and because the old world was filled with debris, and the
new ideas needed room, Columbus gave the new world, offering what
Emerson calls "the last opportunity of Providence for the human race."
Surely this was a strategic moment in history, giving each citizen
unique opportunity.
Each morning the young soul wakens to the supreme luxury of living.
The world is a great beaker brimmed with wine of the gods. The truth
and beauty of field and forest and river give a pleasure that is
exquisite to a keenly sensitive and perfectly healthy youth. Like an
Aeolian harp, the slightest breath avails for wakening melody midst its
strings. But years multiply cares. Age increases heaviness. Time
destroys its own children. The poet says: "In youth we carry the world
like Atlas; in maturity we stoop and bend beneath it; in age it crushes
us to the ground." For the overtaxed and invalided, the dew-drops do
not sparkle as diamonds; the wet grass suggests red flannels and cough
sirups. For the nervous the bird's song is a meaningless chatter. For
the sickly the clouds are big black water-bottles, though time was when
they were chariots for God's angels, curtains for hiding ministering
spirits trooping homeward at night, leaving all the air sweetly
perfumed. It is the body that grants the soul permission to be happy.
How strategic life's better hours! One of God's precious gifts is the
luminous hour that denies the lower animal mood. Mind is not always at
its best. Full oft our thought is sodden and dull. Then duty seems a
maze without a clew and life's skeins all a tangle. The mind is
uneasy, confused and troubled. Then men live to the eye and the ear
and physical comforts; they live for houses and beautiful things in
them; for shelves and rich goods upon them; for factories and large
profits by them. Responsibility to God seems like the faint shadow of
a vaguely remembered dream. The voice of conscience is in the ear like
the far-off murmuring of the sea. The soul is sordid and the finer
senses indurated. The angel of the better nature is bondslave to the
worst. Then enters some element that nurtures the nobler impulse.
Some misfortune, earthquake-like, cleaves through the hard crust. Or
some gentle event, like the coming of an old friend or the returning to
the old homestead, stirs old memories and kindles new thoughts.
Slowly the heart passes out of the penumbra. The mind, too long
obscured like a sun eclipsed by clouds, searches out some rift.
Suddenly reason comes into the clear. God rises like an untroubled sun
upon the soul's horizon. How crystalline life looks! The mind
literally exhales fancies and pictures, and each stick and stone is as
full of suggestions and ideas as the forest is full of birds. Old
problems become clear as noonday. Difficult questions lie clearly
revealed before the mind like landscapes from which the fogs are
lifted. Once the mind crawled tortoise-like through its work. Now it
soars like an eagle. The soul seems a sweet-spiced shrub, and every
leaf is perfumed. If in dull, obscure hours the soul was like a wooden
beehive drifted o'er with snow, in its vision-hours the soul is like a
glass hive out of which the bees go singing into sweet clover-fields.
In these hours how unworthy the material life! How insubstantial the
things of iron, wood and stone! Bodily things seem evanescent, as
frost pictures on the window on a winter's morn. Then honor,
integrity, kindness, generosity alone seem permanent and worth one's
while. How easy then to do right. All habits that fettered the
faculties like iron cuffs are now felt to be but ice fetters, quickly
melting. Then the nobler self, using no whip of cords, looks upon
meanness and selfishness, and by a look drives them from the heart and
life.
Then years are fulfilled in a single hour. Then from its judgment-seat
the soul reviews its past career, searches out secret sins and scorns
them. How unworthy are vanity and pride and selfishness. In what
garments of beauty and attraction are truth and purity clothed. The
soul looks longingly unto the heavenly heights, as desert pilgrims long
for oases and springs of water. Unspeakably precious are these
strategic hours of opportunity. God sends them; divineness is in them;
they cleanse and fertilize the soul; they are like the overflowing
Nile. Men should watch for them and lay out the life-course by them,
as captains ignore the clouds and headlands and steer by the stars for
a long voyage and a distant harbor.
"So each man gets out of the world of men the rebound, the increase and
development of what he brings there. Three men stand in the same field
and look around them, and then they all cry out together. One of them
exclaims, 'How rich!' another cries, 'How strange!' another cries, 'How
beautiful!' And then the three divide the field between them, and they
build their houses there, and in a year you come back and see what
answer the same earth has made to each of her three questioners. They
have all talked with the ground on which they lived, and heard its
answers. They have all held out their several hands, and the same
ground has put its own gift into each of them. What have they got to
show you? One cries, 'Come here and see my barn,' another cries, 'Come
here and see my museum;' the other says, 'Let me read you my poem.'
That is a picture of the way in which a generation, or the race, takes
the great earth and makes it different things to all its children.
With what measure we mete to it, it measures to us again. This is the
rebound of the hard earth--sensitive and soft, although we call it
hard, and feeling with an instant keen discrimination the different
touch of each different human nature which is laid upon it. Reaction
is equal to action."--_Phillips Brooks_.
CHAPTER XII.
To the mystery of life and death must be added the mystery of growth.
When Demosthenes exclaimed: "Yesterday I was not here; I shall not be
here to-morrow; to-day I am here," he suggested a hard problem. Having
solved the enigma, what went before life, and answered that mystery,
what follows after death, there still remains this question: "How can a
babe in twenty years take on the proportions of the great orator and
reformer?" Rocks do not grow, nor diamonds, nor dirt, but a shrunken
bulb does become a lily, and a tiny seed a mustard tree. In vain does
the scientist struggle with this problem--how an acorn can expand into
an oak; how in a single summer a grain of corn can ripen a thousand
grains, like that from which the cornstalk sprang.
Men are indeed familiar with the bursting of buds, the cracking of eggs
and the growth of children; yet familiarity robs these facts of no whit
of their mystery. No jeweler ever goes into the field with a basket of
watches to plant them in rows, expecting when autumn hath come to pick
two or three wagon-loads of stem-winders from iron branches; yet, were
this possible, it would be no more strange than that in the autumn the
husbandman should stand under the branches to fill his basket with
peaches or bunches of figs. For wise men it is no more difficult to
think of a growing engine than of a growing oak. What if to-morrow an
engineer should plant a cannon ball. Having watered it well and kept
the ground loose through hoe or spade, suppose that when a few weeks
have passed the outline of a smokestack should push through the soil,
to be followed a little later by a rudimentary steam whistle, the
outlines of a boiler, and, rising through the sod, rude drive-wheels,
piston-rods and cylinders, until after six months the great engine
should stand forth in full completion. This phenomenon would be no
more wonderful than that which actually goes on before man's blind
eyes, when a tiny seed enlarges into the big tree of California and
constructs a vegetable engine that lifts thousands of hogsheads of
water up to the topmost boughs without any rattle of chains or the din
of machinery.
The heroes of the Old Testament are common people capitalized. What is
unique in the experience of these sons of greatness holds true of all
of lesser rank. The career of one of these giants is a pictorial
exhibition of this principle of the spiritual harvest. Young Jacob was
shrewd, crafty and full of foresight. If Esau, his brother, was a
"hail fellow well met," the child of his impulses, Jacob was a diplomat
and very wily. One day, when the father, Isaac, was blind and old,
Esau grew restless, and at last went away with his companions, for he
dearly loved to hunt. In that hour ambition tempted Jacob and avarice
led him away. Advantaging himself of his brother's absence, Jacob used
the skin of a kid to make his hands hairy, like the hands of Esau, and,
simulating the brother's voice, he extorted from his dying father those
tokens that, according to the Eastern custom, made him the successor to
his father's title, wealth and power. Full twoscore years passed
swiftly by and the deceit seems to have brought is large money returns
to crafty Jacob.
But silently nature was working out the harvest of retribution, through
that law of heredity that makes sons repeat the qualities of their
father. When Jacob was now advanced in years his ten sons began, to
develop craftiness, and soon they plowed great furrows of care in the
father's face. In those days of care his young son Joseph stole into
Jacob's heart like a sweet sunbeam, and, with his open, loving ways,
filled his father's heart with gladness. When the elder brothers knew
Jacob had given Joseph a coat of many colors they remembered the craft
of their father in his early career. One evening, when the herds and
flocks were scattered widely over the hills, Simeon sent out messengers
and called his brothers together for a conference. In that hour he
said: "Wist ye not how our father, being a younger son, supplanted his
elder brother, Esau? And behold his craft will now make his younger
child, Joseph, to supplant his elder brothers! Do ye not remember how
our father, Jacob, took a kid and made his hands like unto the hands of
Esau? Let us now take a kid and make its blood represent the blood and
death of Joseph. What Jacob did for his father, Isaac, let his sons do
to their father, Jacob." Thus, with subtle irony, nature made the
man's sins to come back to him. A boy, Jacob deceived his father, now,
grown gray and old, his boys brought their father an armful of deceits.
In that hour when Reuben and Simeon held up the coat of many colors,
all red with blood, great nature might have whispered to Jacob: "It is
the blood of the kid that you slew for deceiving your father returning
to enable your sons to deceive you." For, having sowed deceit, deceit
also and stratagem Jacob reaped. Himself a son, he thrust a dart into
his father's heart. Become a father, his ten sons became archers,
skilled with darts that filled their father's heart with agony. For
nature loves justice; her rule is law, sometimes her rod is iron.
The principle that every deed is a seed that contains the germ of its
own reward or punishment has received full interpretation by the poets
and dramatists. In his "Paradise Lost," Milton has made a detailed
study of the principles of the spiritual harvests. The poet represents
Satan as an angel, fallen indeed, and sadly battered by his fall, yet
still an archangel glorious for strength and beauty. Having visited
Paradise and accomplished the destruction of Eve's innocence and Adam's
happiness, Satan returns home, passing over a bridge of more prodigious
length than now arches the gulf between earth and hell. When the
prince arrived at Pandemonium, the capital of Lucifer's realm, he found
that the leaders of the fallen host had arranged a reception in the
great banquet-hall of the palace. In the presence of the applauding
throng, the prince told the story of how he had succeeded in opening
the earth as a place to which these exiled angels might retreat from
the prison in which they had been so long confined, and pointed to the
great bridge spanning the abyss 'twixt earth and hell. When the loud
cheerings and rejoicings over this fact had ceased, Satan told by what
stratagem he had succeeded in inducing man to break friendship with
God. It was not by disguising himself as an angel of light. But,
affirmed Satan, man cared so little for the laws of God that, although
disguised as a serpent, he induced man to sin.
Also when Satan attempted to speak, Milton says, only a hiss went forth
"from forked tongue to forked tongue." When many days had passed by
and their hunger was very sore because these fallen angels had seduced
man by an apple, it came about that when, fierce with hunger, they
seized the fruit ripe upon the branches, the apples were found to be
filled with soot and ashes. By these striking suggestions Milton gives
us his idea how angels and men reap what they sow. Should the literary
critic seek an appropriate heading for the tenth book of "Paradise
Lost," he could hardly find one more appropriate than this: "What Man
Soweth, That Shall He Also Reap."
Later on the Grecian threw this moral principle into a tale for
children, a story that still lives under the title "Baucis and
Philemon." One day two travelers entered a village, but as they drew
near, each housewife slammed her door, while rude boys threw clods at
the wayfarers and let loose their dogs, who snapped and snarled after
the travelers. Passing quite beyond the village the pilgrims came to a
humble cottage. As they approached his door Philemon came forth to
offer refuge, and apologized for the rudeness of his neighbors. The
old man prepared for them seats in the grateful shade and hurried to
bring them fresh water from the cool spring. Baucis also hastened to
bring the loaf, with her one small honeycomb and her pitcher of milk.
When the glasses were filled twice and thrice and still the rich milk
failed not, the old housewife marveled, until she found that in the
bottom of the pitcher there was a fountain from which the rich milk
gushed so long as it was needed. Nor did the honeycomb fail, nor did
the sharp knife make the wheaten loaf to be less. Having told us that
the morning brought disaster to the inhospitable villagers, but brought
assurance from these angels who had been entertained unawares that
Baucis and Philemon should never more want for earthly goods, the
writer of the olden times sets forth for us the principle that good man
and bad alike reap what they sow, since each deed contains a harvest
like unto itself. Indeed, literature and life teem with exhibitions of
this principle. Haman, the rich ruler, builds a gallows for poor
Mordecai, whom he hates, and later on Haman himself is hanged upon his
own scaffold. David sets Uriah in the front of the battle and robs him
of his wife, and when a few years have passed, in turn David is robbed
of his wife, his palace also, and his city.
History permits no man to escape the reflection that if, for the time
being, individuals have escaped this moral law, nations have felt its
full force. Nature does, indeed, walk through the fields with
footsteps so gentle as to disturb no drop of dew hanging upon the blade
of grass. Nature also hath her sterner aspect, and for the sons of
iniquity her footsteps are earthquakes, her strokes are strokes of war
and of pestilence. When Sophocles worked out the law of moral
retribution for King Oedipus and Antigone, his daughter, the poet might
well have gone on to note that if the Grecian army had sacked the
Trojan cities the time would come when the Roman fleet would sack her
cities and make her sons to toil as captives. Later on, if the Roman
conquerors swept the East for corn and wheat, looted stores and shops,
pillaged palaces for treasure for triumphal processions, the time came
when Nature and God decreed that the vast wealth piled up in the Roman
capital should excite the cupidity of the Goths, until at last the
streets of that great city were swept with flame and store-houses were
pillaged by marauders. In reviewing the history of Venice Ruskin was
so impressed with this principle of the moral harvest that he affirms
that the history of palace and cathedral, of fleets and navies, is
simply the story, written by a pen dipped in fire and blood, of how the
children reaped what the fathers had sown.
For many months past the statesmen of England have been sending forth
discussions reviewing the career of their country. In the light of the
Eastern problem one of these authors reflects that whenever England has
sown injustice to a weaker nation she has reaped injustice and
retribution for herself. He notes that in the last century the
governors of England--for example, Lord Hastings--went through the land
robbing rajahs, despoiling the people by false weights and measures,
until they had turned the whole country into one vast desert. The hour
came when before the House of Commons Burke impeached Hastings for high
crimes and misdemeanors, as the enemy of India and England and all men.
But England was content to impose a trifling fine upon her wicked
official. How could she give up the treasure she had filched for
herself? Years passed and an injured people brooded upon its wrongs,
and the time came when what England had sown in tears she reaped in
blood. One day the Indian soldiers mutinied. The next day the wells
were filled with the bodies of English officers, their wives and
children; then merchants and missionaries and travelers were
slaughtered. For weeks the strife went on. If once the English
soldier had pillaged the Indian villages, now, in turn, the English
quarters were pillaged. "Blind of eye and hard of heart," said the
sage statesman. "Retribution hath been visited upon us," said the
great leader. "Our jealousy and greed hath ended with that sword being
sharpened against ourselves." The note of conviction is in the voice
of this statesman, but what saith be save this: "What a man soweth,
that also shall he reap!"
All young hearts may well remember that it is safe to do right, but
dangerous to sow wrong! No matter how smooth, how soft and sweet, seem
the paths of sin, know that beneath every flower there lurks a spider,
beneath every silken couch of indulgence there broods a nest of
serpents, and the scene that begins with flowers shall end midst thorns
and thickets. For the moment, indeed, the judge may seem unobservant
and the watchman may seem asleep; but he who yields to any deflection
from honor shall find at last that God never slumbers, that his laws
never sleep. Go east or go west. Nature is upon the track of the
wrong-doer. Could the sage of old sit down to converse with each youth
who to-day walks on the street, perchance he would find many who,
through excess, are draining away the rich forces of nerve and brain
and blood.
Daily they deny reason its book, taste its music, love its noble
companionship. At last, when the harp of the physical senses begins to
give way, and they fall back upon the mental faculties for pleasure,
then these faculties that have been starved shall, in turn, make men
suffer. In that hour reason or memory shall say: "Because I called and
ye refused; because I stretched out my hand and no man regarded,
therefore I will laugh at your calamity. I will mock at your
desolation when your fear cometh as destruction and your desolation as
whirlwind." In Daniel Webster's words of disappointed ambition, "I
still live," we see that a statesman sows what he reaps. In Goethe's
fearful cry for "more light" we see that the poet who sows darkness
shall reap darkness. In Lord Byron's piteous "I must sleep now" we see
that he who sows morbidness and passion reaps feverishness and shame.
The law is inexorable. He who sows foul thoughts shall reap the foul
countenance of a fiend. He who sows pure thoughts shall reap the
sweetness and nobility of the face of Fra Angelico. He who sows
reflection shall reap wisdom. He who sows sympathy shall reap love.
The good Samaritan who sows tenderness to the man wounded by the
wayside shall reap tenderness when angels stoop to bind up his broken
heart.
"Men may die without any opinions, and yet be carried into Abraham's
bosom, but if we be without love, what will knowledge avail? I will
not quarrel with you about opinions. Only see that your heart be right
with God. I am sick of opinions. Give me good and substantial
religion, a humble, gentle love of God and man."--_John Wesley_.
"Therefore, come what may, hold fast to love. Though men should rend
your heart, let them not embitter or harden it. We win by tenderness,
we conquer by forgiveness. O, strive to enter into something of that
large celestial charity which is meek, enduring, unretaliating, and
which even the overbearing world cannot withstand forever! Learn the
new commandment of the Son of God. Not to love merely, but to love _as
He loved_. Go forth in this Spirit to your life duties, go forth,
children of the Cross, to carry everything before you, and win
victories for God by the conquering power of a love like
his."--_Frederick W. Robertson_.
CHAPTER XIII.
Always to the children of good fortune right living has seemed easy,
for these live midst sheltered conditions and exhibit goodness as
naturally as the sheltered southern nooks have grass and flowers when
all the northern hillsides are brown with death or white with snow.
But Christ came teaching the children of weakness and misfortune how to
bear up midst adversity, how to sing songs at midnight and how, through
defeat, to march to final victory. So beautiful was the manhood he
unveiled before men that, beholding it, men low and men high, the
publican and prodigal, the centurion and ruler also, quivered with
hope, as the harp quivers under the touch of the harper.
For his ideal includes every quality that kindles admiration and
delight; all gentleness, all goodness, all simplicity, the refinement
of the scholar, the insight of the seer, the courage that makes the
youth a hero. In luminous hours men behold visions of ideal perfection
hanging like stars in a midnight sky. Unfortunately for many, these
visions burst like bubbles and soon pass away. Artists and sculptors
look forward to an hour when, by a touch here and a touch there, the
statue shall be perfected and the portrait completed; so Christ pointed
forward to an hour when, having been wrought upon by darkness and by
light, by defeat and by victory, by sorrow and by joy, at last wisdom
shall be made perfect, judgment know no error, love have full
disclosure and the soul enter into unhindered perfection.
Great are the achievements of the chisel upon the block of marble,
marvelous the skill with which a master turns a dead canvas into
lustrous life and beauty. Matchless the power that turns a clod into a
rosy apple, a seed into a sheaf of wheat, a babe into a sage; yet
neither nature nor art knows any transformation like unto that wonder
of time when, by slow processes, God develops man out of rude and low
conditions of life unto those high and spiritual moods when selfishness
gives place to self-sacrifice, coarseness to sweetness, hardness to
gentleness and love, and perfection dwells in man as ripeness dwells in
fruit, as maturity dwells in harvests.
Conceding that the Christian is the perfect gentleman, who does for his
fellows what an easy chair does for a tired man, what a winter's fire
is to a lost traveler, we may also affirm that Newman's definition is
inadequate and fragmentary. As the ideal portraits of Christ, from
Perugino to Hoffman, divide the kingdom of beauty--and must be united
in one new conception in order to approach the perfect face--so the
poets and the philosophers, with their diverse conceptions of ideal
manhood, divide the kingdom of character. "The true man cannot be a
fragmentary man," said Plato. Is he not one-sided who masters the
conventional refinement and the stock proprieties, yet indulges in
drunkenness and gluttony? "Pleasure must not be his sole aim," said
the accomplished Chesterfield. "I have enjoyed all the pleasures of
the world, and consequently know their futility, and do not regret
their loss. Those who have no experience are dazzled with there
[Transcriber's note: their?] glare, but I have been behind the scenes
and have seen all the coarse pulleys, which exhibit and move all the
gaudy machines that excite the admiration of the ignorant audience."
Nor is scholarship enough. From Solomon to Burke, the wisest men have
been the saddest of men. The Scottish physician who ordered his
secretary to select from his library all the books upon medicine and
surgery that were printed prior to 1880 and sell them, tells us how
futile is the pursuit of wisdom and how rapidly the systems of to-day
become the cast-off garments of to-morrow. Nor must the perfect man
represent power and wealth alone, for "the wealth of Croesus cannot
bring sleep to the sick man tossing upon his silken couch, and all the
Alexanders and Napoleons have shed bitter tears, conquering or
conquered." He who is merchant or scholar or ruler, and only that,
climbs his pillar like Simeon Stylites.
All such know not that the world itself is a pillar all too small for
the soul to stand upon. This life-chase after bubbles, this fighting
for trifles, this pursuit of false grails, reminds us of the story of
that Grecian boy lured to his death by the enchantress. Going into the
palace garden to pluck a rose, the youth beheld the form of a young
girl standing in the edge of the glimmering woods. With soft words and
sweet, she called him. Forgetting his dear ones in the palace, the
youth ran after his enchantress. Along a pathway of flowers she danced
before him, sometimes sweeping the strings of her harp, sometimes
singing, and shaking her curls at his haste, ever shooting arrows from
her eyes, yet ever just eluding his embrace. On and on she led him
into the bog, that covered his garments with mud, through the thorns
and brambles that tore his white skin, over rocks steep and sharp.
Ever and anon the youth stopped to pluck the thorns from his hands and
bind up his bleeding feet; then, gathering his torn purple about him,
he plunged on, in the hope of drinking at last the sweet cup of her
sorcery. When, at the end of the day, the desire of his heart was
given him, the illusion fell away, for the youth embraced not a
beautiful maiden, but an old hag, who had led him into the desert to a
hut whose stones were darkness and whose walls were confusion.
As the term genius includes all those forms of culture termed poetry,
music, eloquence, leadership, so love is a term that includes all those
shapes of human welfare known as education, refinement, liberty,
happiness. Properly defined, love is that exalted state of mind and
heart when reason is luminous, when judgment and imagination glow under
its influence just as the electric bulb glows under the living current.
There are three possible states and moods under which the mind may
fulfill its functions. There is a dull and quiescent condition when
reason and judgment act, but act without fervor. Power is there, but
it is latent, just as heat is in the unkindled wood lying on the grate,
but the heat is hidden.
Then there is a higher mood of the mind, when, under the influence of
conversation or reading, the mind emits jets and flashes of thought,
through witticism or story; but this creative mood is intermittent and
spasmodic. Last of all is that exalted mood when the mind glows and
throbs, when reason emits thoughts, as stars blaze light; when the
nimbus that overarches the brows of saints in ancient pictures
literally represents the effulgence of the mind. Work done in the
lower moods is called mediocre; work done by the mind in the second
stage is associated with talent, but when, through birth or ancestry,
the mind works ever in regnant and supernal moods, it is called genius.
Affirming that all minds rise into this higher mood at intervals, we
may also affirm that all the best work in literature or art or commerce
has been wrought during these exalted states when love for the work in
hand has rendered the mind luminous and crystalline.
It was love of nature that lent Wordsworth his power to divine nature's
secret. When the poet approached Chamouni and the mountains that gird
it round he tells us he was conscious of a shivering from head to foot,
with mingled awe and fear; his mind glowed with an indescribable
pleasure; his body thrilled as if in the presence of a disembodied
spirit; his heart approached nature with an intensity of joy comparable
only to that joy which Dante felt when approaching Beatrice. But when
the cares of this world gained upon him and the love of nature faded
gradually away in the manner described by him in his "Intimations of
Immortality," then also his power to describe nature faded away. For
only when the heart loves can intellect do great work.
His biographer tells us that when Angelo grew old and blind he was
accustomed to ask his servant to lead him to the torso of Phidias.
Passing his hands slowly over the broken marble, the sculptor entered
into the thought of the great Grecian, and with love for his art
glowing in his face and thrilling in his voice, he mused aloud upon the
genius of Phidias. Love of his art made all his days bright and all
his moons honeymoons. When Wyatt Eaton, the artist, was in Millet's
home he noticed that when the wife called the artist from his task to
his noonday meal, the artist's whole being had so gathered itself into
the eye that there was no life left with which to hear. Love lent
genius skill. No other sentiment is so universal or so powerful in its
influence as love that energizes the mind and heart. Love lent
swiftness to the feet of Sir Galahad; lent his heart courage; lent his
sword victory. Entering the palace, love, said Cicero, "makes gold
shine." Love for the birds lent fame to Audubon; just as love for the
bees lent fortune to Huber. Love of knowledge hived all the wisdom in
the libraries; love of beauty adorned all the galleries; love of
service organized all the philanthropies. To-morrow, at the behest of
love, and in the interests of dear ones at home, all the wheels will
begin to revolve; all the trains go out and all the ships come in.
When a man of real force and worth passes upward into that high state
of purity and sweet reasonableness called love, he becomes almost
sacred and exhales an ineffable and mysterious atmosphere. Great is
the power of trade; wonderful the influence of fortune and force;
marvelous the hundred instrumentalities and institutions of society,
but above all of them is man, whose love can indeed "make riches
splendid," whose wisdom love can make mellow, whose strength love can
make gentle, whose defeats love can turn into victories. In that hour
one hundred men dwell in one man.
Love also perfects morality and fulfills all ethical laws. What health
is to the body, what sweetness is to the lark's song, what perfume is
to the rose, that morality is to culture and character. Drunkenness
and gluttony have not more power to blear the eye than immorality to
degrade the soul. When Homer tells us that Ulysses escaped unharmed
from the enchanted palace, but suffered injury from his unfaithfulness
to a friend, the poet wishes us to know that it is easier to recover
from the poison of Circe's cup than to escape the effect of
disobedience to the laws of God.
There is also the law of truth in speech, the law of purity in thought,
the laws that forbid theft and covetousness and killing. But all these
laws are gathered up and fulfilled in love, just as the seven colors of
nature are gathered up and fulfilled in the one white sunbeam. And he
who loves will fulfill all these laws. Loving himself, man will not
waste his physical treasure. As it was vandalism for the iconoclasts
to pass through the cathedrals of Europe whitewashing the frescoes and
breaking down the statues, much more is it vandalism for men to destroy
that temple of God called the body. If man loves his mind he will,
through culture, lead what is germinal and latent forth into full
blossom and fruitage. He who loves scholarship will make haste to
double the books in his library. He who loves sweetness will double
the sweetness of his melody. He who loves friends will double their
number and strengthen their affection. He who loves industry will
strengthen his toil and lend it influence. Looking toward the home,
love fulfills the law of helpfulness. Looking toward the weak and
poor, love fulfills the law of service and sympathy. Looking toward a
great crisis for humanity, love fulfills the law of martyrdom.
Just as summer fulfills all ripeness and growth for seed and root and
tree, so love fulfills all laws for self and man and the all-loving God.
This law of violence received its first check through the parental
instinct. Parenthood built a fortress with walls and bulwarks about
the babe. Love of offspring caused a weakness to survive. At last an
era dawned when many parents united to construct a shield for weak
children indeed, but also for weak adults. The state lifted the shield
between weakness and its oppressor. The widow and the orphan were
permitted to glean after the harvesters. The traveler, passing through
the field, might pluck a handful of corn or pull a bunch of figs. The
creditor must not take the blanket or coat from the laborer nor the
boat from the poor fisherman, nor the plane or saw from the poor
carpenter. Stimulated by Christ's example and teachings, society began
to multiply the bulwarks against tyranny and selfishness. Looking
toward the child, for the protection of weakness and unripeness, the
state built these shields called the school and library, looking toward
the unfortunate and those weak in body or mind, the state built
bulwarks called asylum and hospital. Looking toward the chimney-sweep,
the factory boys and girls, the state began to soften pain and mitigate
the distress of labor. Looking toward the serf and the slave and the
prisoner, the novelist and poet constructed song and story as shields
for the protection of the weak and the oppressed.
One hundred years ago a man was as a beast of the field, and the
slaughter of men in Italy, by the tyrant who ruled over them, stirred
no more thought in England than the news of the slaughter of so many
beasts. But fifty years ago the state had become so gentle toward the
weak that when Mr. Gladstone made a protest against the savagery and
infuriated cruelty wrought upon the inmates of the dungeons of Italy,
then the heart of Europe turned toward Rome, the throne trembled upon
its foundations. Formerly when any foreign government wished to
colonize Africa, they sent out a regiment of soldiers, cut off a slice
of the country and annexed it. Now public sentiment forbids such
tyranny. The only way the aggressive nations can obtain possession of
new territory is to do it under the name of a protectorate,
sugar-coating, as has been said, the deeds of tyranny. If the dungeon
has been rifled of its prey, if cruelty has been scourged out of the
land, if despotism tottered, it is because society was slowly climbing
up that stairway, of which the first step is fear and the last is love.
In these January days our earth, snow-clad and frost-bound, seems like
a huge ball of ice. Yet all unconsciously to itself, the earth is
being swept on into spring and summer. Unconsciously, but none the
less truly, society, under the silent and secret impulse of the great
God, has been journeying upward toward the time when love shall fulfill
every law; when kindness and sympathy shall be organized in manners and
customs. All the revolutions of the past, all the clangor of war, all
the tumbling down of Bastilles, all the piling up of cities, is as
nothing to the advance of the world toward that era when love shall
perfect man's institutions and civilization.
Love also perfects religion. It is the glory of Christ that he unveils
the sovereignty of character and crowns manhood with all-maturing and
all-perfecting love. Looking backward, man finds that all religions
fall into four classes: There is the religion of fear and force, when
man offers sacrifices to appease the gods and conciliate justice.
There is the religion of law, when men reduce life to formal rules, and
the Pharisee rigorously fulfills his duty as chief, or trader, or
friend. There is the religion of romanticism, when men of powerful
intellect and strong imagination evolve their ideal and, withdrawing to
some cave, give themselves to reverie. In all such self becomes an
orb, so large as to eclipse brother man and God. Last of all there is
the religion of Christ, in which love is root, blossom and fruitage.
It aims at the development and unfolding of everything that is gracious
in life, whatever strikes at admiration, whether it is in school, in
art, in song, in wit, in travel, in books; whatever is praiseworthy in
courage or endurance, whatever has fineness and sweetness and nobility;
all that belongs to the hero and patriot; all that belongs to the seer
and scholar; all that belongs to leadership in trade and commerce--all
these elements are to be united and carried upward into the sweetness
and purity of life, until the full man, standing apart and standing
above life, seems to have been informed with divine love, as with a
presence.
And when love has made the most of the man himself it overflows to
bless others. Christ's disciples are not here to be ministered unto,
but to minister. Religion, says Christ, is love, and love is gentle
toward those with hollow eyes and famine-stricken faces. Love is
kindly toward those who have a tragedy written in the sharpened
countenance. Love is patient toward those who have lost fidelity, as a
man loses a golden coin; who have lost morality as one who flounders in
the Alpine drifts. And this religion of love takes on a thousand
modern forms. If it is not rowing out against the darkness and storm,
as did Grace Darling to save the shipwrecked, it is going forth to
those tossed upon life's billows, to succor and to save. For love is
making the individual life beautiful, making the home beautiful, and
will at last make the church and state beautiful. Men will not bow
down to crowned power nor philosophic power nor esthetic power; but, in
the presence of a great soul, filled with vigor of inspiration and
glowing with love, man will do obeisance. There is no force upon earth
like divine love in the heart of man, and at last that force will
sweeten and regenerate society.
Love also fulfills immortality. Of late science has reduced the number
of things that endure. The astronomer tells us the sun is burning up,
and will be a dying ash-heap as truly as the coal in man's cellar will
be exhausted. The geologists tell us the flowing of "the crystal
springs wearies the mountain's heart as truly as the beating of the
crimson pulse wearies man's; that the force of the iron crag is abated
in its time, like the strength of human sinews in old age." The
everlasting mountains are doomed to decay as surely as the moth and
worm. It seems that the shining texture of stars and suns must wax
old, like a garment, and decay. If now youth is eager to master all
knowledge, plunge into the thick of life's battle, forge some tool,
enact some law, right some wrong, the time will speedily come when the
man will sit down amid the ruins of his life and confess that his idols
have been shivered, one by one.
He who loves endures. For him always all is well. That youth with a
great love for nature's treasures that promised fame, but who found his
open book crimson with the life-current, may dry his tears, for love is
immortal and beyond he will fulfill the dreams denied here. Because he
loves the slave, Livingstone, falling in the African forest, need not
fear, for love will make his work immortal. The sweet mother, whose
love overarches the cradle with thoughts that for number are beyond the
stars, need not fear to leave behind the gentle babe, for everlasting
love will encircle it. Falling into unconsciousness and putting out
upon the yeasty sea midst the falling darkness, man may call back: "I
still live." For God is love and God is eternal. Therefore man who
loves is immortal also.
CHAPTER XIV.
God governs man through the regency of hope. The reasons thereof are
self-evident. Man is born a long way from home. No cradle rocks a
full-orbed manhood. The babe begins a mere handful of germs; a bough
of unblossomed buds. It is a weary climb from nothing to manhood, at
its best. As things rise in the scale of being the distance between
birth and maturity widens. Mollusks are born close up to their full
estate, sandflies mature in two days, butterflies in two weeks,
humming-birds in as many months. But let no man think the vast
all-shadowing redwood trees of California grew in a mushroomic night.
When the seed first thrust its rootlets down into the soil and its
plumule up to the sunshine it entered upon a long career. Saved by
hope after 800 years of growth it gives shade to myriads of birds;
beams for lath and loom and ship in the service of industry; lends pen
and pencil to poet and artist in the service of beauty; through desk
and pew enters into man's intellectual and moral life; through
instruments of convenience strengthens the sweet amenities of the home;
working, it also waited and is saved by hope.
Farmers' boys sometimes set steel traps by shocks of corn whither come
quail and prairie chickens. Stepping upon the traps, the cruel jaws
close upon foot or wing and the bleeding bird beats out its life upon
the frozen ground. Memory often with cruel jaws holds men entrapped.
A single error wrecks the whole life. But once forgiven of God let the
sin go. Reflection upon past sins is good only so long as it produces
revulsion from sin, and like a bow shoots the soul toward God and
righteousness. God is like a mother who forgives the child's sin into
everlasting forgetfulness. Man should be ashamed to remember what God
forgets. "I will cast your sins into the depth of the sea." Someone
says: "God receives the soul as the sea the bather, to return it
cleansed--itself unsoiled." Gather up, therefore, all thy sins--old
wrongs, old hatreds, burning angers, memories of men's treachery; stuff
them into a bag and heave them into the gulf of oblivion. Your life is
not in the past, but in the future. "We are saved by hope."
Let the dead past bury its dead. The future is still ours. The trees
in October willingly let go their leaves to fall into the ditch. Their
life is not in last year's leaves, but in the infant buds that crowd
the old leaves off. Put forth new activities. Open new furrows. Sow
new seed. All the tomorrows are thine; but they are few and short.
Fulfill his dictum who said: "I am as one going once across this vast
continent; I would lean forth and sow as far as hand can scatter my
seed. Let the angels count the bundles." No man should be discouraged
in whom God believes, preserving him in life. Let hope in God sweeten
life's bitterness.
Hope hath her harvest also for teachers and reformers. Often men think
their work is squandered. They seem to be sowing seed not upon the
Nile, to find it again abundantly, but in midocean, to sink and come to
naught. Parents and teachers break their hearts, fearing their
watchfulness and instruction have failed. Men sow wheat and wait six
months for a harvest; but they sow moral seed Sunday and on Monday whip
their children because the seed has not ripened. They forget that
apples bitter in July may be sweet in August. To-day's vice in the
child is often to-morrow's virtue, as acid juices through frost become
saccharine. Yesterday the mother rocked a little angel in the cradle;
to-day she moans: "Alas, that I should have rocked a little fox, a
little serpent, a little wolf!" To-morrow the child becomes a model of
truth and integrity.
The sage might have said: "It is good that woman should hope and wait."
Truth's errand has always been a successful errand. Not a single
social truth or civic truth or moral truth has ever been lost out of
the world. Secrets of cruelty and fraud, secrets of oppression and sin
perish, but nothing that makes life happier or better hath been
forgotten. We do not have to keep God and truth alive, they keep us
alive. Vegetable seeds can be killed, but not moral seeds. When God
issues his silent command to the earth flying into winter and wheels it
back toward summer, it is given to no man to put a brake upon warmth;
nor can he go up against the spring with swords and banners. But
easier this than staying the upward march of mankind. God is abroad
upon a mission of recovery. Open thy hand, O publicist! and sow thy
seed. The seed shall perish, but not the harvest.
Our childhood was pleased with the story of the old monk who was
shipwrecked alone on a desert isle. He always carried with him a few
roots and seeds. Planting these, he died, but sailors coming twenty
years later found the isle waving with fruit trees. To the beauty of
this legend let us add the truth of one who has made all this land his
debtor. In 1801 a youth passed through western Pennsylvania. He was
collecting apple seeds with which to found orchards in the then
unbroken states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. When he came
to an open, sunny spot in the forest he would plant his seeds and
protect them with a brush fence. Years afterward new settlers found
hundreds of these embryo orchards in the forests. Thrice he floated
his canoe laden with seeds down the Ohio to the settlers in Kentucky.
To this brave man, called by our Congressional Record "Johnny
Appleseed," whole states owe their wealth and treasure of vineyards and
orchards. This intrepid man is a beautiful type of all those who,
passing through life's wastes, sow the land with God's eternal truths,
whose leaves and fruits heal nations. If God remembers the roots in
dark forests he will not forget his truths in human hearts. Therefore,
sow thy seed. Ye are saved by hope.
The ground and basis of all hope whatsoever is God. It is his good
providence and redemptive love in Jesus Christ that make us optimists.
Hope is not within the scope of our wisdom or culture or skill; and
hope is not in our health or tool or treasure. We journey into an
unknown future. It is not given to us to know what a day or an hour of
the new year may bring forth. How impotent are the wisest and
strongest in the hour when we hear the sound of the ocean and in
darkness ford the deep and dangerous river, beyond which is high and
eternal noon. What can the child on some great ocean steamer caught in
a winter's storm do to overcome the tempest? Can it drive the fierce
blasts back to their northern haunts? Can its little hand hold the
wheel and guide the great ship? Can its voice still the billows that
can crush the steamer like an egg-shell? Can its breath destroy the
icy coat of mail that covers all the decks? What the child can do is
trust the Captain who has brought this same ship through a hundred hard
storms. It can rest and trust and hope. And all we upon this great
earth-ship have been caught, not in a storm, but in the gulf stream of
God's providence. The warm tropic currents sweep us on to the heavenly
harbor. The trade winds above aid the forward flight. More than all
else is the larger planetary movement that sweeps gulf stream, winds
and ship onward towards the infinite. Soon shall we enter into quiet
waters and cast out our anchor.
Looking forward, let us hope and cleanse all fear out of life--trust
God, love him and rejoice. Even our largest problems need not dispirit
us. Problems are not to be analyzed, but accepted. He who analyzes a
flower loses it. He who cracks a diamond to see what it is, is without
both gem and knowledge. Life's great questions are seeds. Plant a
seed, then wait. Some day the flower and fruit will explain the seed.
It is well to lay aside difficult questions to be asked some day at the
throne of God. Then we will look back to smile at what now disturbs us
exceedingly. Remember the Russian Cathedral--travelers tell us the din
and noise of the crowds thronging under the dome to those above the
dome become a strain of soft music. It is good to hope and wait.
Because God lives and loves, man should enter the future as he enters
temple or cathedral--to dedicate all its days to hope and aspiration.
INDEX.
Bacon; Pascal, 75
"Baucis and Philemon", 249
Garfield, 158
Genius marred by absence of humble virtues, 207
Gentleness, lack of, 181
God, erroneous conception of, 191
God, man's attitude toward, 65
God, punishments of, 85
God the ground and basis of all hope, 194
God's world a good world, 36
Gough, John B., 144
Great hearts, 134
Greatness an accumulation of little deeds, 202
Grey, Jane, 201
Growth by accretion; from seed, 242
Keats, 183
"Keep thou this man", 219
King Saul and the seer, 14
Labor, problem of, 124
Labor, fruition of, 127
Law of violence, the, 270
Life a column of days, 279
Life, problem of, 239
Life's better hours, 233
Lincoln, Abraham, 56
Livingstone, 180
Love, definition of, 264
Love and immortality, 275
Love the fulfillment of all ethical laws, 268
Lowly woman, career of a, 19
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